Enter the Naked Mole Rat
by Silicon Implant
Summary: This is a martial arts 'chop-soccy' epic, set in the canon KP world, days after the 'So the Drama' end of S3. There's sex, violence, complex relationships, lots of Kung Fu, & a fair bit of character development. Mmm... angsty back-story. Dark & gritty
1. Post Diablo Blues

The little sampan rocked rhythmically as it slowly closed on the flotilla of sailing vessels, the two tireless bamboo-hatted boatmen working in relays to propel her with a single oar towards her unplanned date with uncertain destiny. Kim Possible, imminently a high-school senior and recent saviour of the world for possibly the hundredth time, sat cross-legged in relaxed and meditative contemplation at the prow of the sampan. The 4 magnificently decorated junks were moored in a row, stem to stern, right in the middle of Hong Kong's busy Victoria Harbour. She had first seen them from a distance, and even compared with the giant super tankers and bulk carriers of the busy trading port, they took were an impressive sight. Now they were hidden from her by rust streaked freighters and what the raven-haired teenager imagined might be a whaling factory ship. With the junks temporarily out of view, Kim's mind wandered to why she was here, now and not at home in Middleton enjoying her summer...

oOo

After the Little Diablo incident, which was really no big, and the Junior Prom, which had been... well... major drama, Kim had been looking forward to a summer spent trying to work out with Ron what the new and surprising direction their relationship had taken would mean for them both. That and just hanging out as boyfriend and girlfriend, and maybe even going on a date, preferably one where nobody tried to kill them or take over the world. However, less than a week after Shego and Drakken had been carted off to jail again, with nations around the world still counting the cost of Drew Lipski's diabolical scheme and their government's feteing Team Possible for stopping it from becoming much worse, Ron was suddenly summoned to Japan to resume training at Yamanouchi. Kim didn't know what Sensei had said to Ron, but Sensei had appeared to her in a dream and apologised. Actually, he apologised twice - once for taking Ron away from her just at the wrong time, and once extremely profusely for interrupting the extremely lurid and un-Kimlike dream she was already having. Which was the kind of dream she had never really had before she had kissed Ron. Well, perhaps just the once before, when Hirotaka was the steamy star. And there was that other very creepy left-field dream along almost the same lines involving Shego (which is why she had resolved never to eat cheese before bed time again). And after apologising, a clearly somewhat traumatised Sensei promised to always knock loudly before walking in to her dreams again, while for Kim's part she thought that with extensive therapy she might just be able to look Sensei in the eye again sometime before her 60th birthday.

A scant couple of days after Ron left, a wistful Kim was standing outside the penned off ruin of the Middleton Bueno Nacho franchise, idly watching the quantity surveyor appointed by some insurance company or other as he totted up the cost of putting it back into business on his clipboard, when suddenly the ground under her vanished and she felt the now unpleasantly familiar sensation of her internal organs trying to congregate in her chest cavity. A few seconds and several hundred feet later, she landed in front of Betty Director before stepping out of the travel tube somewhat queasily. Before she could compose herself to speak, Dr Director smiled disarmingly and proffered an envelope. "Hi Kim... this is for you" she almost purred.

"You shouldn't have!" replied Kim, expecting a mission briefing or an intelligence report. What she wasn't expecting was an ornate envelope, trimmed with what she could almost swear was real gold leaf, and dominated by a single golden Chinese pictogram.

"We didn't!" said Betty Director, redundantly. "We intercepted it en-route to you and now I'm delivering it". Kim bristled with outrage and exclaimed "You did what to my private mail?".

"Intercepted" said Betty Director, firmly. "I'm sorry, do you want the rest of the items we intercepted? I have a list here... there's 25 letters threatening to do depraved things to you, 67 assorted photos of male body parts, and 2 of female body parts... I think... 2 fake fan letters which our lab found were impregnated with different contact nerve toxins, one letter containing anthrax powder, and a parcel addressed to your brothers containing enough plastique to re-zone your neighbourhood, wired to blow when opened. That and 46 invitations to join the Readers Digest book club. That's this month so far. Would you like to take it all away with you or shall we leave it in your parent's mailbox?"

"Uh... no... thanks... that's fine.." said Kim, suddenly not as outraged as she had been. "So what's so dangerous about this that you intercepted it?" she asked, holding up the three-hundred dollar gold envelope suspiciously. "Nothing at all" said Betty Director, "except that we knew who sent it and we regarded it as a potentially high risk source".

"And..?" prompted Kim, still unwilling to risk opening it.

"It's an invitation; to a martial arts tournament; a very exclusive martial arts tournament indeed. And we would very much like you to accept!"

"A martial arts tournament? Where? When? Why" asked Kim, somewhat taken aback.

"Where? The South China Sea. When? Next week. Why? Well, I have a briefing scheduled for tomorrow afternoon when we can cover that in great detail. In the meantime, we have put the training dojo on sub-level 6, and our entire martial arts training faculty at your disposal, if you wish to prepare yourself. But Kim, please, don't break my instructors - I need them to carry on training my people after you've finished with them"…

oOo

At just that moment, breaking her reverie, the prow of another sampan appeared between the rusting stern of a Liberian registered freighter and a much tidier looking container vessel with a fluttering Red Ensign at its stern. Kim paid particular attention because, in a harbour bustling with small lighters, sampans and water taxis, only this sampan had a prow that angled upwards at about 30 degrees, and Kim instinctively wondered if she might be called on to dive into the filthy harbour to affect a rescue. As the jauntily angled sampan was gradually revealed to her, she saw first a large wooden travel trunk at the prow, and then, further aft... the mystery was solved and Kim grinned inwardly; a Sumo ninja!

The inward grin was momentarily replaced by an inward frown as she realised that it wasn't 'a' Sumo Ninja, but 'the' Sumo Ninja who Ron had so recently tangled with at the corporate headquarters of Bueno Nacho. When she and her sidekick had conducted a head count of their defeated foes before handing them over to the police, the 400lb master of Sumo-style Ninjutsu was nowhere to be found, having vanished into the night like a particularly dense ghost. A fresh inward grin pushed the frown aside though when she saw the Sampan so low in the water at the rear that the boatman who was not on paddling duty was kept very busy bailing frantically as the choppy sea splashed in over the perilously low gunwales. And since she knew where he would be for the next little while, she was sure she would be renewing her acquaintance with the mountainous shadow master...

Reassured that the other sampan wasn't actually sinking, Kim re-centred herself, and settled back once again into the Lotus position on the prow of her own sampan. Once again her mind wandered.. back to the aftermath of a hard morning in the training dojo, deep in the bowels of the top secret GJ facility, buried deep under downtown Middleton…

oOo

Kim bowed respectfully to the three sensei facing her, and they returned her bows, more deeply perhaps than she felt she entirely deserved.

"Thanks!" she said cheerfully. "That really helped a lot. I love your atemi-waza, Master Shen, and that empi and hira-ken combination is just awesome. Sifu Kung, that Sil lim tao technique just rocks. I can tell I'm going to have a decent bruise there. I'm really glad you showed me that, I didn't get caught by it twice, did I! And Sensei Jones, I just love that Ushiro Mawashi Geri and Tetsui Uchi combo, it's so dynamic, you know? If I didn't spend so much time fighting with Shego, that would totally have floored me the first time. But now, I have to get cleaned up and go to a briefing, so I'm not going to be able to continue after lunch today. But I'm really, really grateful for all your time and effort. Please pass on my thanks to Sensei Po and Master Singh for their time yesterday, I'm really sorry that they couldn't join us again this morning. Catch you later!". Kim span on her heel and danced away cheerfully towards the female locker room, looking as fresh as a daisy, after a day and a half of continuous semi and full-contact sparring with 5 of Global Justice's martial arts instructors. Actually, 5 masters of their various arts; GJ's pockets were deep when they staffed their training dojo, and their reach long.

oOo

Some, probably penny-pinching bean counters, might well have argued that employing the likes of a 9th Dan Shotokan master to teach low grade field agents how to defend themselves from henchmen was perhaps gilding the training lily, although given the size of the salary and benefits package, the Shotokan master himself was definitely not one of those likely to complain. Still, every once in a while he did yearn for something more worthy of his skills, and today he was reminding himself to be careful exactly what he wished for in future! The previous day had seen all 5 masters of differing arts and styles sparring with Kim in relays for the entire day. And they had made no impression whatsoever.

She was simply uncanny, reflected Bill Jones, as he offered his shoulder to the limping master of Jeet Kune Do who was struggling towards the men's locker room with a pained expression on his face. Bill had seen perfectly executed techniques from at least 7 other styles that he had recognised when he had faced Kim, and myriad blistering moves that he had never seen - or felt - before. Comparing notes in the canteen at lunch, they were able to tick off at least 14 styles of Kung Fu alone that they recognised between them, and some other moves that they thought might be from related styles or arts, not to mention at least three styles of karate, classical ju-jitsu, aiki-jutsu and tae-kwon-do. And they were all getting their backsides handed to them, gift-wrapped. Bill hadn't laid a finger or toe on her, only Hiro Kung had managed that, and then only the once all day with a Jeet Kung Do technique, and while she was demonstrating awesome control, he was not alone in getting sick of the staccato tap of her feet, knees, elbows and fists on his ribs, joints and head. Drastic action was called for, and they decided to introduce weapons into the training program for the afternoon. Not for Kim, but for them. Bill considered himself highly skilled with the Jo stick, a fearsome weapon against an unarmed opponent. After the first minute of his first sparring session after lunch with Kim, he had revised his objective from handing Kim her metaphorical butt to simply landing a strike on her. Just one.

As she back-flipped over the whistling Jo-stick for the 20th time and struck him with a jumping mae-geri in the chest just hard enough to mark him, he realised that even this limited objective might be unachievable this day. By the close of play that evening, the redhead was still bouncing cheerfully, and they were one instructor down after Kim dodged an overenthusiastic nunchaka strike that would quite probably have knocked her senseless, and the flailing handle instead struck the back of Sensei Po's head, providing instant retribution for his rashness and earning him a stretcher to the infirmary with concussion.

The next morning, Rasheed Singh cried off - he'd strained all the ligaments down the left side of his body hyper-extending in an attempt to kick Kim the previous afternoon, and found he couldn't actually stand up today. And now, Bill and his remaining two comrades held a breakfast council of war. They all agreed that there was nothing sexy about being humiliated by a 17 year old girl, however gracefully she moved, and they hatched a rather rash plan, in hindsight. Clearly Kim was incredibly athletic, but just because she could more than hold her own in a semi-contact bout, the strength and power - not to mention the pain factor - of full-contact sparring - would soon see her in her place. And thus it was that the three survivors broke out the head guards and the pads, and tried again. And this time, when Bill drove a fist that would have gone through Kim's chest and out the other side, if only it had connected, the sidekick that caught him in the solar plexus did more than mark him; it sent him flying across the room, knocked the breath out of him, and probably cracked a rib, in spite of the body pads.

In desperation, after three rounds of bone-crunching humiliation dealt out by a still chirpy Kim, another brief council of war during a pee break led them to play their final hand. They tried double-teaming Kim. And it nearly worked - Kim actually had to block one of his combination strikes instead of dodging it, as Hiro Kung synchronised his attack with Bill's. Close but no cigar.

By the time they decided to form a single team of three and attack her, they were all hurting inside and out. The decision to put the pads back on and make the final session before lunch full contact was perhaps as ill advised as any they had made when dealing with Kim Possible, but the urge to make her wince just the once was too great. Which is how Bill came to be hanging upside down from the wall bars at the side of the dojo, gasping for breath and watching Kim balletically despatching Hiro and Dick Shen to opposite corners of the mat. By the time he caught his breath and climbed down, there was nothing left to do but admit defeat and go eat some lunch. The depth of the bow indicated that he fully understood who had just given a lesson to who here. The news that Kim wasn't going to come back and whale on his 9th dan butt again after lunch actually lifted his mood quite considerably…

oOo

Kim bounced into the locker room, shut the door behind her and then slowed down to the relaxed walk of somebody who has just had an excellent workout, not that she wasn't mischievously enjoying deliberately giving the impression to the GJ training staff that she had yet to even break sweat, and gingerly explored her right bicep with her left hand. Yes, that strike really had taken her unawares yesterday, yes it had hurt like hell, and yes it was already bruising up, and would probably end up a hideous yellowy-purple colour. 'No more short sleeves for me for a while, then' she reflected ruefully. Although she doubted that there was much call for tank tops or bikinis at a martial arts tournament. And with that she stripped off the sweaty gi that GJ had lent her, peeled off and tossed aside the even sweatier panties and sports bra, grabbed a towel from the stack and padded purposefully into the shower area.

The training dojo was designed to cope with groups of up to 50 GJ recruits in training at a time on occasion, and the ladies locker room had a design capacity of 30, although space was necessarily tight in an underground complex. Consequently, there was a single open plan shower area, scoured by powerful jets of hot water from adjustable nozzles spaced around the walls, so Kim promptly adjusted several to point at one spot and then stood in the target area. She loved taking the kind of shower that threatened to peel a layer of her skin off - it made her feel so much cleaner afterwards, and the pummelling water massaged her tired muscles. Her shower at home was kind of wimpish by comparison. As she stood, almost luxuriating in the powerful jets of invigorating hot water, she turned slightly and put her bruised bicep straight in the way of a powerful stream of water, the sudden stab of pain catching her attention again with a start. She examined the growing bruise ruefully for a moment, then reached for the wall-mounted shower-soap dispenser and started to wash herself, beginning with the bruised bicep and its counterpart and then working down her arms.

Another dollop of the cleansing gel and she attacked her sweaty 'pits with vigour, realising as she did so that she could feel the sandpaper-like sign that she needed to shave them again. Kim frowned inwardly at this point, cursing the gender stereotyping that indirectly made her feel the need to spend time shaving off perfectly normal body hair.

Because who had ever heard of a head cheerleader with hairy armpits?

So Kim dutifully played the game and performed contortions with disposable razors every few days, but she had always seethed inwardly while doing it. One of puberty's less welcome gifts, she considered, alongside acne and of course periods.

On the plus side, though, there were boys, and breasts. She loved her breasts. And at that moment she suddenly realised that she had now been absent-mindedly "soaping" them for rather longer than was entirely necessary. The realisation made her blush. And then she scolded herself for prudishly blushing over nothing, rehearsing the mantra "exploring your own maturing body is perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of" that she had first heard spoken in an amusingly flat monotone by the narrator of one of those grainy videos she had watched in health class some years previously.

However, her soaping would be easier if her hands were actually soapy, so she revisited the dispenser to collect a couple of palmfuls and then attacked her chest again, this time making sure she generated a decent lather. Then she scrubbed underneath each breast, and in between them as well, two places that always seemed to feel particularly sweaty after a good workout. Looking down to pay attention to what she was doing, she noticed almost as an aside that where she had been absentmindedly fondling herself moments earlier, her nipples were still standing out proud like little pencil erasers. 'Just like they do when I think about Ron' thought Kim.

An image of Ron in his prom suit swam into her mind's eye and before she could stop herself, and without meaning to, she had mentally undressed the image down to its polka-dot boxers and was mentally pressing herself against the rather optimistically ripped physique of the imaginary Ron. She felt the sudden bloom of heat in her groin, and a tingle of electric pleasure both there and in those protruding nipples, and blushed an even deeper red. The open plan shower in the locker room of the GJ training dojo was no place to be getting hot and bothered about Ron, and certainly no place to... well, she hardly ever did _that_ even at home, for all she knew that it was "perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of"; the embarrassment if anybody heard her doing it would kill her stone dead, she knew, so she could only contemplate it when she could absolutely guarantee that she would have the house entirely to herself, and that only seemed to happen three or four times a year.

No, she told herself, she was just going to finish cleaning up and grab some lunch before her briefing.

She grabbed another squirt of soap and started purposefully lathering her stomach, but she couldn't help herself from imagining it was Ron touching her, and the tingling sensations got stronger. She desperately tried to grab a hold of her rampaging hormones and get them back under control by force of will alone. But then she turned slightly to the right and arched her back to reach the soap dispenser with her left hand, and one of the powerful shower jets connected directly with the nub of her clitoris, and the bolt of pure electric pleasure momentarily swept every inhibition before it. It was only for a second or two, but by the time she remembered where she was and how embarrassed she ought to be, she was standing legs slightly apart and thrusting her crotch into the stream of water from one of the shower jets, while her fingers teased her rock-hard nipples, and her mind's eye played images of the aesthetically enhanced imaginary version of Ron doing things to her that she ought to be shocked by but wasn't at all. As part of her decided she didn't care where she was and surrendered to the building sensations in her body, another part was coolly analysing what she was doing and why. It was the combat, this small part of her decided. Not the exercise alone, but the thrill of combat. And the better the opponent, the hornier she felt. Kicking henchman butt hardly tweaked her libido, whereas the aftermath of fighting with Shego always left her sexually frustrated and needing a change of underwear. Meanwhile, something big was building, she was experiencing sensations that she had never felt before, however hard she had tried, and she hoped and believed it was an orgasm. Her mind's eye was full of disjointed images of Ron, most of them extremely erotic, but the one that bought her rushing towards her first ever climax was of Ron between her widely spread legs, driving into her.

That was when that other small part of her brain thinking about why on earth she was brazenly jilling off in a locker room put Shego's name into her mental movie projector, and suddenly she wasn't seeing Ron thrusting into her, she was looking at Shego's head between her legs, her tongue working at Kim's clit.

Instead of being the terminal passion killer that Kim would have imagined that image would be, on the contrary, in her disinhibited state it flung her right over the edge and hard! Kim Possible came big style, her first ever orgasm also a full-on five-alarm special. Her whole world exploded and next she knew, an indeterminate time later, she was laying panting and in a crumpled heap on the floor of the shower room, with zinging aftershocks pinging through her body. Her legs twitched involuntarily as she lay there, utterly spent, brain fried. Time stood still. Now she knew why people wanted orgasms. If they were all like that she'd need to ration herself if she wasn't to die of pleasure!

After 5 minutes, she felt able to try to stand, and started to wash away any evidence, real or imagined, of what she had just done. Her legs felt like noodles - she couldn't wash that away. And neither could she wash away what mental image had actually pushed her over the edge to her first orgasm. But she didn't have time to try to unravel that drama now. She hoped she would forget about it, but she didn't believe it for a moment. For now, she compartmentalised.

She'd deal later.

If she could.


	2. A Ghost Walks

22 August 2011

14:20

The rain poured like a river from the darkened sky, wind roared, lightning crashed and thunder rolled, all most unseasonably. Fortunately, the farmers of the village of Sosumiha had rushed to finish bringing the harvest in before the heavens had opened; had they not, their crops would surely have been beaten flat or buried in fields of mud.

In 403AD, the rains came very early. But the bandits were on time. They had of course been watching in concealment from the top of the pass that gave the only widely known access to the valley and the village, waiting for the hard work to be done by others and the pickings to be richest. Each year around harvest time, the brigand bands formed themselves and then roamed the countryside, plundering from those villages that failed to pay the protection money. They had avoided Sosumiha for the past eleven years. But it was time for them to return.

Eventually, the plunder of the village would be theirs, and when it was, the village of Sosumiha and its people would be made to pay for almost a century of pain and humiliation. Many of the bandits and brigands had learnt of Sosumiha and its guardians at their mother's or father's knees. Many of them had indeed been orphaned by the guardians of Sosumiha, some orphaned by Toshimiru himself. But they knew, or had faith at least, that they couldn't defend the village forever, and they patiently waited for the guardians to falter. And then it would be farmers with rice flails and Bo or Jo versus heavy cavalry, archers, budokai, brigands and bandits all, and there would be rape and pillage, burning and killing. They'd butcher the men then hang their mutilated corpses up on display outside the boundary of the village, violate and murder the women and then sell the children to the slavers. They would wipe the village of Sosumiha from the map of history, as a lesson to any who might choose to enlist help to resist them in future.

Hamasaki cupped his hand round his eyes to deflect the stinging rain and peered into the gloom at the village below. He could smell cooking fires, and see chinks of light, but nothing more. He pondered for a few seconds, weighing up his options, but then slowly waved the bandit cohort forward, urging his own horse to walk ahead across the mud and slippery rock as he did so. When he had halved the distance between himself and Sosumiha, he called a halt, and again peered ahead into the sodden gloom. Lightning speared across the sky and thunder crashed, but this time he was close enough to see the village illuminated in the stark, flickering white light. Again he could see no villagers. If there were no guardians, then the villagers might have organised an impromptu defence of their own, and he was not keen to lead his men into an ambush, however ineffectual it might be; this band of thieves and cutthroats was a violent meritocracy, and he was still at its head, rather than lying decaying in a ditch, only because he was seen to make the right decisions.

And then the lightning speared again. And his blood froze.

When the lightning forked, an imposing figure in full armour could be seen silhouetted in the middle of the open ground between the village and the bandits. How he had got there was unclear, but he appeared to be alone, and in any case, Hamasaki was committed now. He could not withdraw without losing face with his men. He had only one option, and he acted quickly, despatching archers left and right, and sending ninja skirmishers forward to test what he assumed was one of the guardians of Sosumiha, who stood impassively in the rain, his face hidden by his armour, his arms relaxed by his side, waiting...

By arrangement, as the fourth thunderclap after Hamasaki had dispatched his archers to left and right rolled around the valley, ten bows let fly with a volley. The roar of the torrential rain dulled the twang of bow strings, and the arrows flew silently, invisible in the darkness. Seven of them were well enough aimed to converge on the armoured warrior. And at the very moment they were due to pierce his flesh, suddenly the guardian drew his sword in one lightning movement, and cut 4 arrows with the blade, so that they fell harmlessly in splinters around him. And then he was suddenly holding a metal shield, and the remaining three arrows bounced away harmlessly.

A moment later, the four Ninjas exploded from the ground at each point of the compass around the guardian, the scene as they came up frozen in a flicker of lightning, but between lightning bolts it was not at all clear what was happening from Hamasaki's vantage point. The next flicker of lightning revealed a still life tableaux, with three ninja attacking, and one falling, his head separated from his body. The next flash of lightning revealed a ninja caught in mid air as he was being cleaved in half by the guardian. Hamasaki observed that the guardian was a veritable giant, perhaps a whole shaku taller than either of the two remaining Ninja whose swords were flashing towards him. The final flash of lightning, seconds later, revealed a ninja with a small axe buried in his forehead, falling, and the other ninja, broken sword in hand, looking down in horror at the arm which was buried in and straight out through the back of his chest cavity, courtesy of a knife-hand punch. If and when the last Ninja was defeated, Hamasaki knew that the archers ranged around him would immediately fire a second volley, but he was disturbed to only see three outgoing arrows.

Looking to his left just as a flicker of lightning lit the low hill to that side revealed just two archers of the 5 on that side who he was expecting to see. And then the lightning flickered again and there was a searing frozen image of a black clad man snapping the neck of the penultimate archer from behind.

The next flash of lightning captured the guardian moments after he had plucked the one accurate arrow that had been fired in the second volley out of the air with his hand and snapped it between his fingers.

There would be no third volley, Hamasaki realised numbly.

Quickly, refusing to succumb to impotent rage, Hamasaki signalled some of his men to protect the flanks and the rear from the ninja who had eliminated his archers. Then he called forth his secret weapon. A trio of mercenaries, battle hardened budoka, professional warriors. All were armoured, and mounted, and all three were fearsomely skilled. To secure their services, Hamasaki had promised them all quadruple shares of the booty if they defeated the guardians.

Now he wasn't at all sure that the mercenaries would succeed, far from it in fact, but he knew that he couldn't afford to come away from Sosumiha empty handed and also pay them off without the rest of the band of thieves and cutthroats around him finding the price of his failure too high for them. His mercenary warriors would win, or die, he decided.

When all three had gathered next to him, he looked each in the eye for a moment and then said "Do not return without his head!" and pointed towards the guardian, who was once again standing impassively in the driving rain. The three professional budoka nodded wordlessly, and then walked their horses forward, slowly, towards the village and the waiting guardian. As they plodded forward, they gradually arranged themselves into a line abreast. Rain drops bounced high off their armour as they advanced, slowly. Then, seemingly without signal, the three urged their horses to a gentle canter. A few seconds later, also in unprompted unison, they dramatically drew their katana. And then they spurred their horses to a full gallop, and charged into the gloom towards the guardian.

Who, a flash of lightning revealed, had not yet moved, despite two tons of horseflesh and armoured warrior bearing down on him at speed.

What happened next was once again not clear to Hamasaki. A particularly dramatic fork of lightning just moments before the three charging horsemen reached the Guardian had shown him to be still standing impassively, arms at his sides. Then Hamasaki was sure he saw a flicker of blue light through the gloom, he heard the clash of steel and heard an abbreviated scream, even through the roar of the rain. When the lightning flickered again there was one warrior, katana in hand, mounted on a horse that was trotting towards the village. Hamasaki was momentarily heartened, but then the lightning flickered again and this time it captured the severed head toppling from the mercenary's body, and blood spurting upwards from the stump of the neck. Hamasaki also realised that the guardian was still, apparently, standing impassively where he had before the charging budokai had reached him.

Just as Hamasaki wondered where the other two mercenaries might be, two terrified riderless horses galloped past him, away from the village, answering the question. He knew immediately that there was nothing to do but leave this place, and focus on keeping his own head. He still believed that the guardians were just men, not magic as some easily excitable fools claimed, and that they couldn't defend the village forever, and one day soon, if he lived through the aftermath of this day, he resolved to return. If he didn't his replacement certainly would. Sosumiha would pay for this eventually.

It was as he turned his horse away from the village and prepared to signal his men to withdraw that he heard his name called. "Kazai Hamasaki! I wish to speak with you!", the powerful voice echoed around the valley. He stopped. He had no wish to approach the guardian. He was a competent swordsman, but he was not stupid, and neither was he superhuman. But on the other hand, he could not afford to lose face with his men, since that would be just as fatal. Before he had time to make the wrong decision, the powerful voice boomed out again, cutting through the wind and the rain; "Kazai Hamasaki! Come here and bring your cadre with you. If you sheath your weapons and draw close, you have my word as a warrior that I shall not strike the first blow!"

He knew he had no choice. That the guardian was promising not to kill him out of hand tipped the balance, although he found it hard to believe. But no guardian had spoken aloud in living memory; they had long been the silent but deadly defenders of Sosumiha. And how had the guardian known his name? No matter, if he had to do this, then he would do it with style. He turned his horse again, gave the order for his men to sheath or lower their weapons, and led them slowly towards the guardian. Following him, they advanced slowly, warily, fear etched on many of their faces. When Hamasaki, at the head of the cohort, was 20 feet from the guardian, the huge warrior suddenly put his hand up. Hamasaki, who had been getting increasingly nervous as he neared the guardian, was only too happy to come to a halt. The guardian waved his arm in a sweep and boomed "Gather around where you can hear me!".

As the bandits and cutthroats nervously arranged themselves around the guardian in a semi-circle three deep, Hamasaki took the opportunity to study the warrior at close quarters for the first time. He was a giant of a man, no doubt - well over 6 shaku tall, when the tallest person he knew was about 5 and a half shaku in height. His armour was jet black, save for a crest on the chest which Hamasaki felt he might have seen before. At the moment the armour glistened wet as the rain ran off it in rivers, and the bandit leader glanced down to the ground where it puddled around the guardian's feet, catching his breath as he realised that the mud around his feet was pink, and it was liberally seeded with body parts and ragged pieces of human flesh. He forced himself to raise his eyes again and focus on the mask which concealed the guardian's face.

Some moments passed, and then the guardian spoke. "You should know that I have given my word that neither I, nor any of my warriors, will strike the first blow. This does not mean I will not strike the last if you raise a weapon to me".

He paused for effect.

"I have called you together to give you fair and final warning that I am tired of defending this village against attack, and that I will no longer be merciful to those who come here to attack it in future. I give you notice that hereafter anyone who enters this valley with malice in their heart will not leave it alive. And after I have killed them, I will hunt down their loved ones, their children, their parents and kill them also. If you return here, you will die. If your children return here, they will die. And so will you. After death, those I kill will never rest easily in the spirit world because I will not let them!".

There was restless shuffling in the ranks around him, and some angry muttering.

Anxious not to let the situation escalate out of control, Hamasaki quickly asked loudly "Who are you to threaten our families? We may return with an entire army to kill you just for that!". "No, Kazai Hamasaki, you cannot kill me however many men you bring to their deaths. You cannot kill me because...", the guardian unlatched his mask at this point, and then removed his helmet "...I am the immortal ghost of Toshimiru, made flesh by ancient magic to guard this village for all eternity!"

There were gasps from recognition from a few of the cutthroats behind him, as the powerful face of a man in his late twenties was revealed, and Hamasaki realised with a start that they, and he, were looking at the spitting image of the giant statue that he had once seen towering over the Yamanouchi monastery, complete with the same armour. And then he suddenly remembered where he had seen that crest before. It had been carved into the chest of the statue of Toshimiru!

"I have been defending Sosumiha for 85 years, sometimes alone, sometimes with the help of other spirits, but I am tired of defeating the same enemy again and again, and enough is enough! If you return you will die, as will everybody you care about. I leave it to you to spread the word to your loved ones - remember that if they come here to pillage, you too will die and spend eternity in pain and misery!". At that point, as if to convince anybody who might be sceptical, the self-proclaimed ghost of Toshimiru began to glow blue, the blue light escaping through the gaps in his armour and from his head. And that was definitely not of this world, decided Hamasaki, and he could palpably feel the bandits behind him recoiling in fear and horror. "Now GO!" thundered Toshimiru's ghost, "And never return to Sosumiha!".

Hamasaki needed no second invitation, as he wheeled his horse, and waved the bandit hoard away; as he did so he saw that many of them had already started to run towards the pass that would take them out of the valley, some discarding their weapons as they went. He knew that he would never return to Sosumiha, and he suspected that neither would many if any of those who had followed him there today.

He only hoped that he would survive their wrath.


	3. The last of the few

Sato Fujiwara remained in his impassive pose, as rain poured down his face and ran off his armour in rivers. Now that he had taken the helmet off, it was running down his back inside the armour, and pooling in the small of his back most uncomfortably. He felt like a drowned rat.

He waited until the last of the fleeing bandits had vanished into the gloom towards the pass out of the valley and then, with uncanny mastery of the mystical monkey power, he allowed the blue glow to fade away to nothing. Still he stood, though - just in case Hamasaki had left any stragglers behind. He knew that Master's Itoh and Kyoki would shadow them out of the valley and deal with any concealed threat, but he hoped his performance had been convincing enough to ensure that there would not be any. If anybody were to have called his bluff, all would have been lost.

After a few minutes, he sensed rather than saw two black-clad figures silently approaching him, leaping from rock to rock with simian grace, from opposite sides of the valley. He relaxed slightly. They wouldn't have returned unless the bandits had left the valley. They were both more than worthy to succeed him in the role of Sensei of the Yamanouchi monastery, he reflected. They were both true masters of Tai Sheng Pek Kwar and either would command the loyalty and respect of the Yamanouchi.

But neither would have the mystical monkey power, and the guardian had to shoulder his share of the blame for that, he realised.

Suddenly, as the two ninja approached him, a terrible involuntary shudder wracked his body, and his legs sagged under him. He almost fell into the mud, stumbling forward with his head spinning. His time was almost up, he realised, and it was a warning that he could not afford to ignore. Still he felt weak, and started to sink to his knees...

"Sensei!" exclaimed Master Itoh, as he caught the falling guardian, a half second later joined by Kyoki who had also sprinted to catch him.

Supported between the two black clad ninja, all three of them soaked to the skin, Master Fujiwara felt his strength return, although he knew it was only temporarily, and bid his two students to follow him into the dry and the warm. The villagers always had a hut kept ready for the guardians, which they stocked well with food and provisions when needed, and one of the villagers would set and tend a fire for them. The guardians had never asked for such largess, but were grateful for it nonetheless, and the villagers for their part knew that they owed their continued survival not to mention prosperity to the presence their protectors.

Once inside the hut, the guardian quickly but reverentially removed Toshimiru's magical battle armour and placed it on the stand provided, along with the Lotus blade. "Take the lotus blade back to Yamanouchi, Master Itoh. When you leave, tell the villagers to return the sacred armour of Master Toshimiru and the Cuff of Sosumiha to their hiding place" he commanded.

The two men and one woman meanwhile quickly stripped off their cold, wet shinobi shozoko and undergarments, and then climbed naked into the large wooden vat which the villagers had pre-filled for them with piping hot water.

Bliss. 

He would miss this, he realised. More than he could put in to words. He had been on this earth for 88 years, and he could remember all of them bar the first two.

And now he was about to die.

But before he did, there was something he had to do.

He absent mindedly fingered a small scratch on the outside of his upper arm, where he had caught himself as he ran to don the armour earlier. He made sure that he was seated securely in the tub, and that the water was not too hot for him as he would shortly be, and then warned his two fellow bathers that he was about to remove the Cuff of Sosumiha. They moved close to him. He took one last deep breath, and then focussed the mystical monkey power on the invisible jewelry round his upper arm. Some had chosen to wear it round their wrist, others their ankle, but he had always preferred the traditional location. As he focussed, he felt the strength, the youthful vitality leave his body, as he shrank 18 inches in height and aged over half a century in a moment, his now frail and mottled body almost collapsing into the bath. As he did so, an unremarkable but heavy metal bracelet appeared around his shriveled bicep with its clasp open, and fell towards the water; it was deftly caught by Mito Kyoki before it got wet.

The familiar feeling of being barely able to breathe that accompanied his emphysema returned, and the scratch on his upper arm seemed more painful in his own body - no wonder, he reflected, since the nick was now on the folds of loose skin that hung from his upper arms, and that had covered his own impressive musculature in his youth. He had retained much of this physique even into his late 70's, by virtue of punishingly rigorous training. Now, though, age had overtaken him, his time was nigh and he knew he had to speak before it ran out completely.

"There is something important I must tell you, before I pass", he wheezed painfully, "so I crave your attention".

Both his students nodded to indicate they were attentive to his words.

"You have seen the power of the Cuff of Sosumiha now on several occasions, but the story behind its forging and the sacred sworn duty of the disciples of Yamanouchi to defend this village from attack would normally be told only to those selected to receive the mystical monkey power. The tragedy is that for you this cannot happen. Therefore, as the last known living master of the mystical monkey power, it falls upon me to tell you, as the next Sensei of Yamanouchi...".

The two naked masters looked at each other, in some surprise, then back to their Sensei, who frowned at their distraction...

"Yes, one of you, both of you, either of you - you should know that you both have my blessing, and my will states as much. But please, focus on what I tell you now, for I will not be here to tell you again, and you must not ever write it down. Despite that, you must remember it and pass it on by word of mouth to your successor, lest it be forgotten. For one day, mystical monkey power may return, and if and when it does, its keepers must know the eternal debt of honour that they owe to the inhabitants of this village, and the power that these artefacts can give them to repay that debt.

"Almost a century ago, the great warrior Toshimiru and his followers were on a long journey from the west that had them passing near here. They had been across a great ocean to a land called Manchuria where Toshimiru and his disciples had first found the monkey idols and the mystical monkey power. Returning to Japan, he was searching for a site to found a monastery and a school of Tai Sheng Pek Kwar, when they were all struck down by a terrible illness, possibly from drinking tainted water. When they first became ill, they concealed themselves carefully in some reed beds perhaps ten miles from here and hoped to wait out the fever. But the fever got worse. Two of Toshimiru's followers died, and the survivors were all terribly ill, mostly delirious. A small raiding party of bandits who had just attacked the peaceful village of Sosumiha happened to be passing the hidden encampment, just as one of the hallucinating warriors screamed something at the top of his lungs.

"Discovering the hidden camp, the bandits attacked. Even weakened and with many of his warriors comatose, they were able to defeat the marauders, but they could not stop some of the bandits from escaping. Toshimuru knew that the bandits would bring back a larger force, one that in their present state they would have no chance of defeating. He did not have enough warriors who could even walk to carry the sick away. And then the exertion of the fight caught up with the few of them who had been able to wield weapons and they, also, collapsed. However, a farmer from Sosumiha had witnessed the battle, and realising that the warriors would soon be butchered, he raced back to the village and enlisted peasants and their wagons. They came up, collected the fallen warriors and all their goods and chattels, and took them back to the village, where the villagers took them into their homes without question and started nursing them back to health. The larger bandit cohort had gone to the site of the hidden encampment and then split up into smaller groups to look for the escaped warriors.

"Eventually, one small group of bandits headed to Sosumiha. The locals moved the invalids and their belongings into a cave concealed in the rock face behind the village, and then feigned ignorance. The head man of the village refused to admit to knowing anything, even when they threatened to kill him unless he gave up the warriors. He still denied any knowledge and was beheaded for his trouble. Still, the villagers refused to give up the warriors, all complete strangers to them, despite threats to kill other villagers. Fortunately, the bandits believed the man they had killed, and left empty handed without inflicting further bloodshed. Later, the small group of bandits returned, by which time Toshimuru had recovered sufficiently to make them pay for their earlier beheading of the head man. But Toshimiru was wracked by guilt and admiration for the brave and noble stand of the peasants of Sosumiha, and he pledged to the village on his own life that he would be there in the flesh to defend them against any who wished them harm for as long as his body had breath, and all eternity if that were possible. As soon as he had made the pledge, he realised the impracticality of his promise, but he was a man of supreme honour and resolved that he would nonetheless keep his word to the villagers, who had been prepared to die to save the life of several complete strangers, himself included.

"Temporarily abandoning the search for a site for the monastery, Toshimiru sent a small expedition on a quest, to return to Manchuria and to locate the Monkey Shaman Artisan who had first forged the Lotus blade for him and had imbued it with mystical monkey magic and ask him to return to Sosumiha. When eventually the warriors who went on this epic quest found their quarry, the Shaman was so moved by the story of the sacrifice of the people of Sosumiha that he agreed to return with them. But it was seventeen long months before the Monkey Shaman reached Sosumiha, and in the meantime bandits and marauders kept attacking, and kept being defeated. Eventually, after a year of failure, all the bandit groups for miles around combined under the command of a local warlord and attacked en-masse. A legend was born that day, as Sosumiha and six other mystical monkey masters defended Sosumiha against a concerted attack by 350 murderers, cut-throats and thieves. At the end of the battle, four of the original seven guardians lay dead, all the others wounded, and round about them lay three hundred corpses of their attackers, while of the remaining 50, many were maimed."

At this point, he paused, his failing lungs having fallen behind his need for air as he had spoken.

After a few wheezing breaths had reduced the deficit somewhat, he apologised and added "When you go out to the cemeteries tomorrow to bury me, you will see that there are three burial grounds. One spreads as far as the eye can see, and that is where those who the guardians have slain lie. Toshimiru always insisted that those who died at the hands of the guardians should be given a decent burial, with their names on a marker, so that their families could come to pay proper respects if they wished. Some of them even do. The village has a diviner descended from the original manchurian Monkey Shaman. Her family has been divining the names of the dead for the last 80 years so that the villagers could mark their graves. Then there is the villages' own burial ground of course. There is also a much smaller cemetery for the graves of the guardians.

"The grave of the head man who laid down his life that Toshimiru and his followers might live is there, as well as the graves of the two warriors who died of fever, and of the four who died in the first great battle. Since then, only two guardians have died defending the village, the rest buried there - including Master Toshimiru himself - have died of natural causes. You will see that I have picked myself out a peaceful plot next to Master Tamahita.

"The villagers maintain the graves of the guardians out of respect, but it has been the sacred duty of the guardians to maintain the grave of the head man of the village. It would please me, as it would please Master Toshimiru, if that tradition continued, and if worthy men and women from Yamanouchi would come here to tidy and look after the head man's grave even without the mystical monkey power".

His two attentive students bowed their heads momentarily, and Mito said "As you wish, Sensei, of course it shall be done!".

"Thank you" wheezed Sato Fujiwara, pausing again to catch his breath.

"When the expedition returned with the Shaman, Toshimiru-san explained exactly what he had pledged, and asked the shaman for his advice. The shaman meditated for a week, and then built himself a forge which he enchanted with strange magics and commenced work. What he forged was an enchanted cuff which, after a further month of meditation and magical incantations, would give any posessor of mystical monkey power the physical flesh and blood form of Toshimiru as he was at the time of the forging of the cuff, approximately 28 years old and at the height of his physical powers. This was how Toshimiru could keep his pledge to be there in the flesh without having to live in the village for ever, and even defend it from beyond his grave. A mystical monkey master who wears the cuff is physically indistinguishable from and can do everything that Toshimiru could do at 28, apart from siring children; the magical Toshimiru is sterile. Even Toshimiru himself used the Cuff of Sosumiha in his later years. Since it was forged it has been used by numerous mystical monkey masters to defend this village, from Master Wie, a four foot tall woman who died before you were born, to Master Lee, who you may remember was blind in his own body but found that he could see when he took the form of Master Toshimiru. But the cuff can only give this gift to a bearer of the mystical monkey power; to anybody else, it is just a rather unattractive piece of jewellery.

"The mystical monkey shaman also forged magical battle armour for each of the original guardians of Sosumiha. For anybody except the mystical monkey master for which it was enchanted, it was 'merely' fine and ornate armour. For the mystical monkey master whose crest appeared on the breastplate of each suit, the armour is... was... special. The four guardians who died in the first great battle here were killed from distance by volleys of arrows. Toshimiru knew that the next time the warlord returned, he would bring even more archers, and that even a mystical monkey master can only dodge so many arrows for so long. The shaman enchanted the armour so that when the owner was under threat by arrow, stone or slingshot, the armour would fly to him or her and protect them without bidding. Then the armour alerted them to any approaching missiles and the magics would slow time itself as the arrows came close, so that the wearer would have ample opportunity to defend against them.

"Each of the enchanted suits of armour turned to dust when its owner joined their ancestors. All except Toshimiru's armour, which still carries the enchantment, because for as long as the Cuff of Sosumiha exists, so does Toshimiru.".

And then he frowned, sorrowfully.

"I am quite probably the last ever mystical monkey master. After Master Toshimiru passed, the new Sensei was one of his original followers, Master Abe. He became consumed with worry that the mystical monkey power might fall into the wrong hands and proposed that the jade monkey idols which carried the mystical monkey power be concealed in the far corners of the world, so that nobody could ever bring them back together. I was one of the last Yamanouchi initiates to be blessed with the mystical monkey power. Shortly afterwards, Master Abe sent forth expeditions to travel to the North, South, East and West ends of the earth to conceal the idols. The mystical monkey masters who went on these great quests were twenty years older than I at the time they left, and they never returned. I must therefore conclude that I am the last ever living master of the mystical monkey power and I know that each laboured breath I take could be my last.

At that moment, the three masters heard a discreet cough from the doorway of the hut. The village diviner was here to answer the question that Sato Fujiwara had been waiting for the answer to all day.

When?

The diviner had already told him that he would face battle today, and that today his time on earth was up. He had known that without mystical monkey power, Yamanouchi would struggle to defend the village for ever against the bandits who kept coming back time and again. He just hoped that his subterfuge would work. If he had scared enough of the bandits severely enough, perhaps Sosumiha would be safe for a long time after all.

"I was able to cast runes, master Fujiwara. Your time is tonight as the moon crosses the peak of Hamkenjutsi. I have taken the liberty of preparing this water clock for you. It will empty in good time for you to prepare yourself."

That meant he didn't have to suffer like this. It was imperative that he didn't die while wearing the Cuff of Sosumiha; one thing the cuff could not do was to extend his natural span, and had he died while wearing it, its magic would have died with him. Now he could wear the cuff, and enjoy the last evening of his life fit, strong and virile, removing the cuff only as his life ebbed away. This had become the custom amongst the last few monkey masters whose lives had drawn to a natural close here.

The diviner was speaking again. "On behalf of all the villagers of Sosumiha, I can only thank you for once again prevailing against those who would destroy us. The debt that we owe to you and the guardians who came before you is beyond words."

"It was our bounden duty", wheezed the frail master. "I am only glad to have served. On behalf of the Guardians of Sosumiha, past and present, I in turn thank you and your fellow villagers for your boundless hospitality."

The diviner bowed, formally.

He spoke again, more softly, gently; "And Suki... thank you...". He smiled at her, having used her first name for the first time in 25 years. She smiled in return, her eyes sparkling for a brief shared moment.

Then he was the warrior again. "And now... I would like to prepare for my death with my comrades. Please may I request a little privacy?"

"Of course, master Fujiwara." bowed the diviner, setting the water clock down near the door and withdrawing, pausing only to pull a curtain across the doorway.

With trembling hand, he picked up the Cuff of Sosumiha once more and clicked it closed around his emaciated arm. Instantly it vanished as vitality poured back into him in a great wave. Once again he took a deep breath and stretched Master Toshimiru's impressive musculature. He had the luxury, after 88 years of ascetic self denial and dedication to the art of Tai Sheng Pek Kwar, of spending the very last fraction of a day of his life with his youth and vigour restored. How should he spend his last hours alive?

Should he meditate?

No, with his increasing physical frailty he had done little but meditate for the past five years. It was probably the reason he had survived this long.

Should he impart any last drop of wisdom to his two students before he left them?

No, he could think of none that he had not already shared, and they would have to find their own way soon enough.

Sparring, perhaps? 

No, he had done nothing but trade blows with Itoh and Kyoki for three days before the bandits attacked. And he was enjoying the hot bath too much, anyway.

So what regrets might he still have when his time came later tonight?

Only one he could think of - that he had chosen a path that denied him the joy of sexual congress when he was young enough to enjoy it. 

His eyes widened with a start. His only regret was that he hadn't gotten laid for over 70 years? Why didn't he realise this earlier? He could have made some arrangements!

As he thought it, he realised of course that he couldn't have. It was only the fact that his duty was done and that it was the end of his life that allowed him to think in such... undisciplined... terms. Were it not for the Cuff of Sosumiha, he would be no less full of regrets, but he wouldn't have been in any position to quench them. And he knew that he could not spurn that unique gift.

He realised with a start that he had been staring vacantly into space for the previous few minutes, as he came to terms with his unexpectedly hedonistic desires, and he focussed on his two students, who were looking at him with concern, and also - he realised - sadness. If he explained himself, perhaps his students might be able to... procure him... somebody to... be with... before it was too late. He looked down, ashamed, and spoke softly.

"Since I was a teenager, I have dedicated my life to the rigorous and disciplined study of Tai Sheng Pek Kwar, to the exclusion of all... distractions. I realise now, as my time here is all but done, that I will have but one selfish regret. I regret that I have not partaken of the pleasures of the flesh in the way that those who have not sought the ascetic life of self denial and introspection of a true monkey master might have done. I crave your indulgence, though I am not worthy. Would it be possible that you might go forth and find me a... willing companion... so that I might try to... erase my regret before time runs out?"

There was a silence. It felt like it lasted a week, although it couldn't have been more than a minute. Eventually, Master Fujiwara risked a glance up at his students, terrified that he might see shocked expressions, horror or perhaps even disgust. What he actually saw was a deep and meaningful conversation between Masters Itoh and Kyoki, conducted entirely without spoken words, and mostly with the eyes. It occurred to him only now that perhaps not everybody considered that a proper study of Tai Sheng Pek Kwar required denying oneself all the pleasures of the flesh. And that perhaps Masters Itoh and Kyaki knew more about the pleasures of each others flesh than they had cared to make public.

The silent conversation drew to a close. Mito Kyoki opened her eyes wide as if seeking reassurance, and Tori Itoh smiled, offering it. Perhaps he had even squeezed her hand under the water. She turned to him and spoke softly. "Master Fujiwara. I regret that there is no time for us to find you a willing concubine, and yet it is our great honour to make your last mortal wish come true. Accordingly, and as a mark of our respect for you, Sensei, it is my honour to offer you my body!".

It was the only thing to be done, she told herself. They could not conceivably have considered asking such a thing of any of the villagers, though she suspected that one or two who had swooned over the steel-like pectorals and rippling abdominals of Toshimiru's extraordinary torso might have been willing. She knew that if she or her lover Tori had taken the fastest horse in the village, galloped at full speed into the dusk to the nearest town that might have a geisha house, and brought back a concubine at the gallop, the water clock would have long since emptied, and Master Fujiwara gone to meet his ancestors unsated. Her wordless discussion with Tori had covered all this ground, and he had agreed with her impeccable logic, even giving her his blessing and reassuring her that he would not be jealous or upset if she made an old man very happy before he died. She did notice though that he wasn't leaving. He was obviously going to stay right there in the bath and watch.

And probably enjoy the show.

It did help greatly that she knew Master Fujiwara, held him in the greatest of esteem, and was only too glad to do something deeply meaningful for him in his last hours of life. It helped even more that Master Fujiwara was in the body of Toshimiru, who at 28 had had a physique, a sexual magnetism, and a sheer physical presence, that was truly legendary. Just looking at his face made her knees weaken, and his body...

She had moved closer to his powerful and well defined torso, and now she stood up, exposing her petite breasts above the soapy water. She was looking down on him slightly as he sat, and he quickly placed his hand on her shoulder and looked at her tenderly, his face mirroring the deep gratitude he felt.

"Master Kyoki, you are beautiful, and I am indeed honoured, not to mention deeply touched that you should consider such a wonderful and selfless gesture for a foolish old man. But I must explain... that, well... my desires... you are a woman, and I really have need of..."

Her eyes widened as she understood the implications of his words. But her reaction was nothing to the loudly exclaimed "Oh!" that emanated from her lover, who had clearly not anticipated this turn of events.


	4. The Ninth Form

When Toshimiru had journeyed to Manchuria, he was already a gifted and accomplished martial artist, and he had already studied Tai Sheng Pek Kwar amongst several other Japanese and Chinese fighting arts. When he was chosen by the Manchurian Shaman who was keeper of the spirit of Sun Wukong, to receive the mystical monkey power, he revelled in his newfound skills and abilities as a martial artist and explored them to the fullest extent. He knew something already of the 5 martial forms of Tai Sheng Pek Kwar (or Dai Shing Pop Gar as the manchurian Shaman knew it) and was highly skilled in three of them. Mastering each one alone could be a lifetime's study for a dedicated martial artist, and yet Toshimiru found himself mystically imbued with complete mastery of the way of the tall monkey, the way of the wooden monkey, the way of the lost monkey, the way of the stone monkey, and the most elusive and difficult fighting form of Tai Sheng Pek Kwar, the way of the drunken monkey.

Toshimiru himself never looked beyond mastery of the 5 martial forms of Tai Sheng Pek Kwar when he gained mystical monkey power and never suggested to his pupils that they should do so; which is a pity, because as anyone who knows the legend of Sun Wukong could have told him, the monkey king was far more than an incomparable martial artist, and the power he left behind imbued those touched by it with mastery of four further forms.

If only they had known.

Mystical monkey power didn't come with a user manual. If nobody had told you, you would only know you had it when you ended up in a fight with somebody and suddenly discovered that you were unexpectedly a master of five forms of monkey kung-fu.

In truth, not all of the non-martial forms, developed by Sun Wukong in the mists of Chinese pre-history, were entirely relevant in the modern world of pre-feudal japan. And some of them were outrageously frivolous even when they were created.

The 6th form, for example, is total mastery of a primitive and rather unpromising single-stringed musical instrument with an unpronounceable name that was prevalent in just one small region of China some thousand years previously. No such instrument had existed for 800 years, and then not within a thousand miles. And no such instrument would exist until the entirely co-incidental invention of the uncannily similar tea-chest bass one and a half millenia later.

The 7th form is mastery of cloud flying. The prequisite for cloud flying being availability of an enchanted cloud, this was also not a form of immediate relevance.

The 8th form was dear to Sun Wukong's heart, despite it having earned him five centuries buried under a mountain. It is supreme mastery of urinatory calligraphy. That is 'writing your name in the snow', but with really precise and beautiful handwriting. Female mystical monkey masters would have been well advised to warm up and stretch for at least half an hour before practising this form, had they known of their skill; the gyrations involved for them in producing some kanji pictograms would have reminded one of a serious gymnastic workout.

But then there was the 9th form. Sun Wukong didn't even develop it for his own pleasure. In fact, he used ancient magic to create the 9th form of mystical monkey power for the sole ignoble purpose of annoying Zhu-Bajie, his companion on the legendary long journey south. Zhu-Bajie, a notoriously prolific serial lothario, suddenly found that he had lost his touch. People kept stealing his potential sexual conquests from his arms and then satisfying them beyond human endurance, thus ensuring that Zhu-Bajie's prodigous lusts remained unfulfilled. Unknown to him, it was Sun Wukong, in various guises. For 6 months, Sun Wukong had denied Zhu-Bajie every single sexual indulgence by beating him to the punch as it were, and he became more and more frustrated. Whatever he tried, Sun Wukong was always one step ahead. He changed form to become a woman to chase lesbians, but Sun Wukong was there first, and ended up stealing the women from out of his bed in one case. He tried seducing men as a man, and Sun Wukong got in there first again. He even tried seducing men in the form of a beautiful woman, but again he was denied.

Finally, at his wits end, he caught Sun Wukong in the act as he laughed so much he inadvertently changed back to his own form at the wrong moment, and the long running practical joke was over.

But the 9th form of mystical monkey power remained.

The 9th form encompasses all the accumulated skill and knowledge of humankind in the art, science and emotion of sensuality, sexuality and sexual activity. Think of the Karma Sutra as representing a small footnote in the encyclopaedic knowledge of the art of erotic indulgence available to a master of the 9th form. With the knowledge comes the skill to apply it to any sexual situation.

But not one of the mystical monkey masters of the Yamanouchi monastery had ever known of the gift of any of the final four forms of the power, let alone the 9th. And now the last of them was only going to discover his mastery of the 9th form on his metaphorical deathbed.

Mito Kyoki bowed to Master Fujiwara, then lent forward and kissed him lightly on the forehead, before smiling at him as she backed away to the other side of the tub. Then, guilty for enjoying the moment, she turned to a slightly hunted looking Tori Itoh and gave him an encouraging nod and a smile, much as he had given to her. And now she was resolved to do what he would have done if Master Fujiwara had taken her up on her offer.

Watch.

Partly out of curiosity, and partly because thinking about it was really getting her wet...

Now he'd done it. Tori Itoh had just agreed all too readily to the idea that his lover should pleasure another man while he watched, and was now hoist by his own petard. True, he respected - even loved - his sensei, and it was indeed their honour to fulfill his last wish before his imminent death, but it was so much easier to encourage Mito to have sex with another man while he watched than to offer to do it himself. Not least, because he didn't consider himself to be homosexual.

Fortunately, he was open minded. And, as a disciplined martial artist, all be it more sexually active than recent tradition had dictated, he was more than willing to endure to achieve. He could do this.

He hadn't ever lusted after a man, although he had admired one or two. Nome more so than the body of Master Toshimiru, for its awesome physique.

"Well, if having sex with that body doesn't do anything for me, then I can be pretty sure I'm straight" he told himself, with resigned amusement. Then, he steeled himself, and moved slowly across the wooden tub towards Master Fujiwara. He bowed slightly and said, softly "It is my honour, sensei!", as he stopped, legs touching Master Fujiwara, who had developed an expression that seemed to combine gratitude with barely disguised lust, scaring Tori just a little.

But rather than scare him right out the tub, the mystical monkey master lent in and tenderly kissed him on the forehead. He calmed down slightly. The next tender kiss was on the tip of his nose. OK, he could cope with this. It wasn't lighting his candle, but he could do this for his sensei. Then the next, oh so tender kiss was a peck on the lips. And as they parted, Tori heard Mito give a sudden involuntary gasp, a sound he recognised and a sideways glance revealed that the hand that wasn't holding the side of the tub was clearly somewhere between her legs as she was getting off on what he was doing with Master Fujiwara. And suddenly at the thought of her getting off on what he was doing, he found himself getting quite aroused. And the next time Sato Fujiwara leant in to peck him on the lips, he opened his mouth and drew him in to a full on snog, and the little yelp of uncontrollable pleasure from his lover who was frigging herself into ecstasy as she watched, spurred him on again.

And then Sato Fujiwara's hand carressed his testes gently before slipping into place around his now engorged member and it was his turn to yelp in some surprise. Moments later, guided by the power of the 9th form of mystical monkey power, Master Fujiwara's hand began a rythmic movement that took Tori Itoh's breath away. And suddenly it was him letting his head fall back and moaning in ecstasy, and the fact that it was a man who was giving him a better hand-job than he had ever given himself was suddenly no longer important.

He was so wrapped up in his own unexpected pleasure after that moment, that he didn't hear Mito Kyoki's screaming climax. Nor her next one, nor indeed the two after that.

oOo

Mito Kyoki woke at about midnight, and propped herself on one arm to check that the candles she and Tori had set around the mortal remains of the last guardian of Sosumiha still burnt brightly, as he lay in a fine white silk Gi, awaiting his interment in the morning. The end had been sudden, but not in any way unexpected. Tori had been so spent that he had been dozing to one side of the tub, and Mito had him to herself. For a few minutes it was just like it always used to be - Sensei patiently instructing her. She still remembered when she had been a little girl and Master Fujiwara had taught her how to punch without breaking her fingers. Or the whole day he had once spent showing her how to get more snap into her monkey-eats-lotus-flower strike. But now he was teaching her the secret of the technique behind the hand job that had so rocked her lover's world, so that she could perhaps emulate a small fraction of what she had seen Master Fujiwara do earlier. Then suddenly, the thwack of bamboo falling told them both that time was up.

Master Fujiwara had sighed, whistfully but happily, stood up, stretched lazily, and then vaulted athletically out of the tub, waking Tori. Landing softly, he picked up a boult of cloth and vigorously and briskly dried himself, then deftly collected the clothing he wished to be buried in and placed it in a neat pile beside him, before assuming a seated position on the tatame mat that he would expect to be laid out on.

His last words were "I hope you'll be very happy together. As happy as you've made me!". Then he had willed himself back into his 89 year old shell, the Cuff of Sosumiha falling to the floor beside him. He turned to one side, perhaps intending to dress himself in the burial clothes he had laid out. At that moment, his body gave out, and he clutched his chest. He turned back to look at his two students, and a smile spread across his face. Then he fell backwards. A few minutes later, he was dead.

Still smiling.

Myoto also smiled, as she rolled back against Tori's warmth and slipped back to sleep.

Tori & Myoti Itoh shared the roll of sensei to the Yamanouchi monastery; the first post-mystical-monkey-power sensei. It is thanks to their wisdom and dedication that the monastery survived and even prospered. For the next century, initiates from Yamanouchi still regularly made the long trek to the village to maintain one grave, as per Sato Fujiwara's last request; the grave of the head man of the village of Sosumiha, slain by bandits while protecting Master Toshimiru and his men from certain slaughter.

A man called "Nori Yamanouchi".

The bandits never did return to Sosumiha, so effective had the Guardian's last stand been. In the end, just after the turn of the 6th century, an earthquake buried the village under a hundred feet of mud, where it lay undisturbed for another 1500 years.


	5. Extraordinary Rendition

Shego sat alone in the back of the armoured paddy wagon, her badly singed cat-suit still smelling strongly of burnt fabric, and wallowed in a mixture of self pity and self loathing.

It had all started when Dr Drakken had decided to start being secretive about his latest and most grandiose scheme, she decided. Contrary to some evidence, Drew Lipski was not a homicidal maniac as far as she could determine. There was little doubt that he was insane by many measures. Advanced ego-mania, and a persecution complex aside, his biggest failing, for a man with an IQ well into the 200+ range, was a personality disorder that gave him his child-like lack of forethought and grasp of the consequences of his actions.

When Shego knew what he was planning, all she normally had to say, with a suitable sneer, was something like "Hey, Dr. D, are you planning to take over the world or kill half the people in it?" as she pointed out the glaringly obvious flaw in this scheme or that, and he would have made some dismissive reply, before frowning and then reworking the suspect bit so that it didn't destroy the planet or kill half the inhabitants when it was activated. It was exactly the same failing that ensured that he was never actually likely to succeed in his ambition to take over the world. And of course if he ever did by some miracle succeed, he had no earthly idea what he would do with it. He'd simply never thought that far ahead.

While he was unlikely to succeed in taking over the world, he was much more likely to inadvertently exterminate humanity, without somebody around to point out those aforementioned fatal flaws in his plans. But unlike a proper homicidal maniac, Drakken would say 'Oops' with great sincerity, just before the planet exploded. And in the case of the Little Diablo scheme, it nearly came to that. Most 8 year olds could have told you that unleashing hundreds of thousands of giant laser-wielding battle robots on the world would cause mass casualties and horrendous damage unless some careful steps were taken to control them; most 8 year olds, but not Drew Lipski.

It was the sort of thing Shego would have mentioned, sarcastically of course.

Had she known.

But working on the ostrich principle, Dr Drakken had decided that if he didn't tell Shego what he was up to, and she couldn't guess his plan, then Kim Possible wouldn't either. The problem was that she thought she had guessed his plan, and she had been entirely wrong. She'd wholly underestimated the blue-skinned lunatic, not something that anybody could often say about Drakken. She had thought he was obsessing over Kim Possible again and was taking over Bueno Nacho just to mess with the sidekick's head. The Little Diablos had made no sense to her when they first appeared, but then so much about many of Drakken's plans made no sense whatsoever that she just assumed he was losing the plot again. It wasn't until the millions of little toys had suddenly transformed into giant killer robots that she had had an inkling that her employer had done something so brilliantly and breathtakingly stupid that she might have to break him in half later, and by then she was a little busy with an unusually pissed off Kimmie; she really hadn't laughed off the whole Erik the synthodrone thing like she'd thought she would. That one had been all Shego's idea, and it had kept her chuckling for days. She'd hoped to have it confirmed that Kimmie was less of a virginal goodie two-shoes than she acted, which had mainly been her motivation for persuading Drakken to create the Erik drone, because Erik was many things - but anatomically correct wasn't one of them.

In fact, 'his' beanbag-stuffed crotch had 'Hard luck, Princess' written across it in black indelible marker.

But it appeared that Kim hadn't seen the joke, either figuratively or literally. In fact, Shego assumed, Kim must have been having some pretty serious hormonal issues, judging by the ferocity with which she laid into Shego later. And the thing about fighting Kimmie was that you had to be both brilliant and absolutely on the case to have a chance. Shego could usually manage the first, but she found that she was starting to worry about the unintended consequences of Drakken's scheme and what they might be. The result was almost predictable, she mused; Kim at very definitely the wrong time of the wrong month versus a distracted Shego was going to end in tears. What she hadn't expected was that Kim would lose it to the point that she actually tried to kill her! Most people don't have a comet-enhanced constitution. Most people who become the discharge path to earth for 17KV at 112 Amps would be reduced to charred flesh. Most people who were kicked off a tall building to fall to earth some hundred feet below would also not be eligible to vote afterwards. Shego wasn't most people, but even she had had her synapses well scrambled and her central nervous system disrupted. It was a good half hour after they had loaded her into the van opposite Drakken before she could move her limbs reliably, and before the feeling of intense pain from every nerve fibre in her body subsided to the point where only the extensive bruising hurt. It was 15 minutes later before she trusted her vocal chords to work. For all of that time she had been joining the mental dots and realising with mounting horror what the likely consequences of Drakken's scheme would have been, and probably had been. She had then only had ten minutes to call Drakken all the names under the sun for his stupidity and tell him that he had probably killed tens of thousands of people.

That was when the armoured van had stopped, and the rest of the human cargo had been ordered out by a couple of burly but nervous looking National Guardsman with M16's held at the aim. Through the open back doors she could see state troopers, more national guardsman, a couple of armoured vehicles and she could hear a couple of helicopters hovering overhead. Police probably. Or maybe National Guard gunships. She hadn't been concerned when the doors closed again, leaving her inside the van in chains. She felt she could use a bit of recuperation time before she made herself scarce, and she expected that in due course GJ would want to talk to her, which would give her an opportunity to tell them herself that the catastrophic death toll that she assumed Drakken had caused wasn't any of her doing. She wasn't entirely sure why it had mattered to her that anybody knew that apart from her, let alone that she should personally tell them, but for some reason it had.

Did.

A way of atoning for her lack of insight, perhaps?

"They'll find out soon enough, anyway", she thought. She realised that there was a comprehensive surveillance archive from both the lair and the Bueno Nacho corporate HQ, and that GJ's finest would already be poring over it, analyzing it. Besides, she was glad that she wasn't in the same cell as Drakken again. By now she would probably have battered him to a bloody pulp, and then his pathetic whimpering would have made her feel guilty about doing it. This time she anticipated Drakken spending a long time in jail. A very long time indeed. She doubted that she would be breaking him out herself, either.

"If he's really just killed tens of thousands of people all round the world, and if I was dumb enough to just let it happen, then maybe prison really is the best place for him" she thought. "Although what he really needs is a psychiatric hospital". Shego there and then resolved to anonymously hire a very expensive lawyer for him to help make the case for Drakken being guilty but insane.

The first inkling she had that there was anything unusual going on was when the journey in the van seemed to drag on. After a while, she had pretty much run out of things to beat herself up about and started wondering what was taking so long, not to mention where she was going. As boredom prevailed, and as the van bounced and hopped across the country for what seemed like a lifetime, Shego entertained herself by using a controlled jet of plasma to liberate a few links from the then unused chain running along the floor next to the bench seat opposite her. Then she delicately added them to the chains that were theoretically securing her, in such a way that you couldn't see the join.

Shego was quite proud of her welding work in the end, especially given that it had been done with only a jet of superheated plasma emerging from the end of her index finger, and she had been welding titanium alloy without an inert gas shield, in the back of a heavily armoured paddy wagon that was bouncing about like a cork in a storm on its tired springs most of the time. She doubted that either chain would be any less strong than they ever were; more than that, all the welds were undetectable to the naked eye, or would be once they had weathered for a day or two. Utterly pointless, but a very satisfying way to pass otherwise dead time.

Quite a lot of dead time, she realised, and Shego was starting to get uncomfortable on the unforgiving bench. She had been intending to stick around until she'd had a chance to unburden herself to Global Justice, perhaps had gotten a good night's sleep or two, had let her bruises heal. Then she had been intending to take her leave at her leisure. "However, if they don't schedule a bathroom break in the next 20 minutes or so, I'll be leaving early! Perhaps I'll send Dr Director a postcard", she mused. Although - she frowned - that would mean burning through the chains she had just spent over two painstaking hours carefully re-fabricating. Just at that moment the paddy wagon slowed dramatically, and then turned slowly off the metalled highway onto what she quickly discovered was a very rough dirt road, which was jiggling her now somewhat full bladder quite uncomfortably. 'Still', she reflected, 'journeys end is presumably nigh'.

She had taken advantage of the recently lengthened chains to stand up, better absorbing the violent swaying and the crashing bumps through her knees. After about 10 minutes the truck slowed again, and changed direction once more, this time on a slightly smoother surface. Perhaps a poorly maintained road or rough concrete, Shego decided. She was just starting to debate with herself whether or not to cut her way straight into the drivers cab or out through the armour-plated floor of the truck when it swung to a halt. Then it reversed briefly, before finally stopping abruptly with a loud hiss of air-brakes. The engine shuddered to a halt. 'Finally!', Shego thought, impatiently.

There was a bit of banging and clattering from outside the truck, and then the back doors swung aside and she found herself dazzled by an array of powerful arc-lights shining directly into her face. She shielded her eyes in some annoyance, wondering what all the melodrama was in aid of. If only she'd known, then she'd have been long gone. With the back door open she again heard the beat of hovering rotor blades somewhere above, but this time she had judged that it was a large single rotor helicopter, probably military, possibly something like a Blackhawk. The pins locking the chains to the truck snapped back, as an unseen lever was pulled, and then the slack in the chain that ended at her wrists was taken up by somebody outside the truck who was concealed from her by the light show. Then she heard - and she assumed was meant to hear - the racking of numerous slides, and the pulling of numerous cocking handles, somewhere out there in the brightness. The message was clear enough.

Moments later a voice distorted by a loudhailer commanded her to climb out of the van, and she felt a gentle pulling on the chains. Cocking an eyebrow, she did as the loudhailer commanded, more interested in getting to somewhere she could take a pee at this point than trying to work out what the hell Global Justice were up to with all the idiotic grandstanding.

As she stepped out of the truck into the dazzling light, she stumbled forward as the chain was unexpectedly tugged just as she was off balance and she found herself slamming into the heavy duty bars of a cage, and at that moment a set of equally heavy duty bars which had been waiting above her for her to pass below slammed down behind her and were locked into place.

"Enough already!" she yelled, but just at that moment she had felt a sharp, stabbing pain in her left buttock, deep into the muscle. She twisted her head round with a snarl of rage in time to see one of those long poles with a big needle on the end, the kind vets use to tranquilise dangerous caged wild animals at the zoo, being withdrawn. As she had turned, the floodlights had been cut, presumably to stop her seeing or identifying her assailant at the blunt end of that pole. Her hands were still in front of her, pulled there by the chain, so she couldn't issue the immediate retribution that instinct had demanded. That instinct had lit her hands though, and she turned her head forward again, but this time with the lights off, outside the cage she could see only a handful of people, illuminated by her green glow, plus a big reel to reel tape machine, and she realised that she had been suckered by sound effects. Behind the tape machine and the now dark arc-lights she also saw the outline of a derelict hanger and the silhouette of a small business jet. But before she had a chance to hurl any plasma at the architects of her current situation, suddenly she found herself falling, and falling a very long way indeed into inky blackness.

oOo

The next thing Shego was aware of was throbbing pain in her head. She didn't know where she was, or for a few moments who she was, but she had long ago trained herself that in those circumstances, opening your eyes and groaning or moving was never the best policy. So she stayed exactly as she was while she tried to work out what on earth was going on.

Eventually events came back to her, although her fuddled brain couldn't quite yet work out what those events she remembered meant. Instead, still playing possum, she tried to work out where she was, just using her ears. She knew as soon as she asked herself. Being a bit of a plane geek had its uses. She was on that Challenger 605 that she'd seen before she had passed out. Probably, from the feel of things, towards the rear of the plane, and facing the direction of flight, but from the way the sound of the engines was reaching her ears, she decided that was just forward of the rear-mounted engine nacelles, not directly between them.

As she started to become more aware, as whatever they had shot her up with was broken down and metabolised by her comet-enhanced liver, she started to better understand her situation. She realised that she was upright, arms and legs akimbo, presumably cuffed or chained in place. She was hanging against her restraints, so was able to work out that she was secured at ankle, wrist, waist and neck. She also then realised two further things almost simultaneously; her bladder was no longer full, and whatever she was wearing, it wasn't her trade-mark form-fitting green and black suit. From its feel against her skin, she surmised that it as a loose fitting garment made of a cheap poly-cotton material. She also then noticed, though it took a while to process all the sensations, that her very expensive sports bra had gone missing in action, and that she was wearing... a somewhat damp diaper.

Her hands almost sparked spontaneously into angry flame at that point, but she controlled herself with great effort. She knew that somebody was definitely going to pay for all this, though.

While she willed herself to think calm, tranquil, happy thoughts to control the rising rage, one of her fingers involuntarily twitched, and touched something solid. That surprised her. She explored with her fingers, carefully at first and then more boldly, and found that her hands were actually completely contained inside metal spheres which appeared to form part of her wrist restraints. Now she was really confused. This wasn't Global Justice's work, unless they had declared amateur hour or decided to run a 'who can really piss Shego off the most for no good reason' contest. GJ would have told her where they wanted to take her, and asked her if she was prepared to give her word that she wouldn't try to escape before she got there. If she had been, and she would have been, they would have showed her up the steps of the plane and probably even taken the cuffs off for the duration of the flight. They knew she kept her word. It was in the file they kept on her. She rarely gave it, but had never broken it. More importantly, if they had wanted to take her against her will, they would have done a better job. The metal globes around the hands reeked of somebody who didn't understand Shego's plasma powers trying to work out how to neutralise them. She knew that Global Justice knew a great deal more about her than that.

And they would also have known that drugging her wasn't as easy as it looked, either. Whoever had done this had used something sufficiently potent to knock her out, which meant that they probably wouldn't have expected its recipient to wake up for some considerable time. Possibly after the plane she had awoken on had landed. The plane confused her as well. Until she realised that it might be taking her overseas. And that had made another mental connection for her. She risked cracking one eye open a tiny bit and found that there was a hood over her head, concealing her face from her captors. When she opened her eyes fully, she was able to see the top of an orange jumpsuit inside the bottom of the hood.

Extraordinary rendition.

The CIA.

Or somebody acting like them. But why? How had they taken her out of the hands of law enforcement inside the continental USA and where were they planning on shipping her? It had still made no sense. She had wracked her brain, trying to remember what she had read on the subject, and had another brief moment of rage as the paragraph in the article she had read about the use of sedative suppositories on those being transported jumped out of her minds eye.

She had a quick and very careful squeeze of the muscles thereabouts, and nothing felt amiss. She'd need to check properly later, but she was reasonably sure that her back passage hadn't been violated, so she simmered down a little. There would soon have been somebody walking around out there who would never have been physically able to pick his nose again if she had discovered that the little ball bag had stuck a finger up her butt without asking first. The sedative would probably have had little effect on her anyway.

However, the lack of it told her that whatever they had given her had indeed been meant to keep her out for the duration. All she needed now was to let her unnatural metabolism process more of the crap out of her system, and work out where the plane was. If they were flying over land, she could take them at any time she felt ready, but if they were crossing a major ocean, she really needed to make her move when she was near a major land-mass, so that she could fly the captured plane into radar clutter, put it on the ground quickly and make good her escape, leaving just enough time beforehand for her to kick seventeen shades of holy living crap out of her captors before she departed.

It was ten minutes before she heard the sound of a telephone ringing in the cabin, and then somebody - an American by his accent - answered, said "Thanks, I'll tell him!", then put the phone down. "We've caught a tail wind", said the voice. "We'll be on the ground in Cape Verde to refuel and re-crew in just under 3 hours, and our ETA in Tashkent is now 2300 EST, 1000 Local."

"Great!" said another voice, "I wanna be back stateside in time for my kid's first little league game. I've done Tashkent before and if we don't get airborne out of there by about 1400 local, the flight crew will be out of hours to get us back to Cape Verde, we'll be stuck there for another night and I'll be screwed. His mother already thinks I don't give a shit, that's why we got divorced in the first place".

"We'll make it!" said the first man, reassuringly.

Shego's head, meanwhile, was spinning again as she tried to take in the enormous implications of what she had just heard.

First, the practical - and she needed to get that straight in her mind because thinking about the other first would just make her too angry to analyse the practicalities later.

3 hours from Cape Verde put the plane roughly mid-Atlantic. More disturbingly, knowing approximately where they had taken off from to within a hundred miles or so, that was outside the cruising range of a Challenger 605. Which meant that they must already have landed once and refuelled. Thinking about it, the obvious East Coast stop would be Cuba. Guantanamo. But that meant that she had been out for the count for maybe 6, 8 hours or more. And if they'd given her enough of anything to knock her out for that long, wouldn't it have killed a normal person?

Unless perhaps they'd given her some kind of binary agent, designed to render somebody comatose for an extended period or until they were given an antidote. Which would explain why they were paying her no attention. As far as they were concerned she'd be a sack of unconscious meat until after they handed her over to the Uzbek authorities.

So she just had to bide her time until they were about 30 minutes out from Cape Verde, since for her plan of action to succeed she needed the plane to be at or near cruising altitude. Which would give her time to brood about the idea that somebody, anybody, would hand her or anybody else over to the SNB, the Uzbek secret police. Uzbekistan was where the government boiled political prisoners alive or tortured them to death, apparently not even as a means of extracting information, but as a signal to others who would oppose them. Shego knew all this, and she knew why the Uzbek's wanted her as well.

She'd been to Uzbekistan about 18 months ago, not for any higher purpose, but because Drakken had wanted the rocket motors from some festering cold-war tactical nuclear weapons that were stored in the mountains there.

Not the warheads, thank your deity of choice, just the liquid fuelled rocket engines. Not that she would have stolen the latter for him anyway, but the mere thought that he might have wanted them would have scared her half to death.

He could have bought or built better rocket motors himself, and she could have told him that, but Shego liked the challenge of stealing them from a nuclear weapons store, so she took a few of his henchmen with her and went "shopping". She had discovered the hard way that the Russian FSB security at the storage site was excellent, but not quite good enough to stop her from leaving with several rocket engines from an engineering spares store. Although she assumed that security would have been beefed up if she had gone back again, since if she had been after the warheads, she would probably have had them. As it was, she drove out the shattered gates of the compound in a stolen truck carrying the rocket motors, and several unconscious or wounded henchmen, although none of the injuries were life threatening as it transpired. The FSB men defending the site would be sheepish but mostly uninjured. When they woke up.

But it wasn't the raid that was the reason that the Uzbeks wanted her, it was what happened after, as they made good their escape. She'd been flying top cover for Drakken, who was in one of his stealth hoverships, in the VTOL all-weather strike plane that he'd designed and built to her spec in the spare time between his other projects. Happy that the stealth hovership really was undetectable on Uzbek radar, she decided to stop drawing attention to it by flying in a different direction to draw any opposition away from the mad scientist.

As Dr D was leaving Uzbek airspace with a full load of battered and bleeding henchmen and several stolen rocket engines, she had caught sight of what appeared to be dead bodies in the square of a small town she was passing over. She had pulled an Immelman turn and gone back for a closer look. Focussing the high-resolution FLIR camera on the spot, she was disturbed to see men and women, ordinary people, laying in the town square, some surrounded by pools of blood, amongst torn and bloodied banners and fallen placards that would seem to suggest that some kind of a demonstration had been in progress. There was an armoured car on one edge of the square, and she could see, when she looked at Infra-Red mode on her FLIR display, that the barrel of the machine gun on top of the turret was hot. As she had watched, men in police uniforms had moved through the square, pausing only to shoot wounded people on the ground in the head. She realised that she was watching a slaughter of innocents, a massacre.

The images sickened Shego, and she put the jet down in a clearing in a nearby copse of trees and practically ran into the town, incandescent with rage. And then she kind of lost it a bit with the butchers who had done this thing. And by the time she walked quite calmly out of the town, 40 minutes later, as far as she knew there was not a policeman or an SNB man alive in the town, and their vehicles and buildings burned in ruins.

It had got worse. Survivors of the massacre had been crying at her feet, thanking her, and others had told her of their brothers and sons and daughters held in the basement of the interior ministry building, next to the police station she had just reduced to burning rubble, and so she had gone there, just to free them. Then she had fought her way in to the building and down to the basement, taking care this time not to kill people, something she had not done with the butchers in police uniform.

Once through the heavy steel doors and into the vaulted basement, she had discovered a terrible and horrifying example of man's barbarity to man, a grisly medieval torture chamber, full of unspeakable horrors. And she'd found the torturers, hiding from her down there, huddled together in their recreation room, where they watched western satellite TV and drank coffee in between drilling holes in people's skulls and pulling their finger nails out with pliers.

Her first instinct had been to vapourise them slowly from the feet upwards. But then suddenly from being enraged by what she had seen, she was unexpectedly calm, ice cold and detached. She had expertly laid into the bloodstained monsters in front of her, breaking limbs, and burning flesh, but she only did enough to render them immobile, not unconscious. And then she went and freed the victims of the torture, and she showed them, the ones who could walk and weren't catatonic, where the torturers broken bodies were laying, and she told them in broken Russian that it was up to them what justice for their tormentors was.

The blood curdling screams that had followed her out of the door as she left were music to her ears.

As she walked away from the interior ministry building, friends and family members of people who had been held, and many who had probably died in that basement, started to stream the other way. Many were crying, many thanked her, a small girl hugged her for saving her daddy. She ruffled the child's hair in relaxed fashion, and grinned cheerfully at those thanking her as she stepped over the corpses of some of the men she had beaten to death, or blown in two, and whose blood was splashed across her green and black flight suit.

She had strolled back to the copse, relaxed and almost pleased with herself. She felt that sense of accomplishment, of personal pride, that she had often strived for as a member of Team Go, and had almost always failed to achieve. Not that Hego would ever have approved of what she had just done in a million years.

She'd just lifted clear of the trees, when she was shocked to get a bleep from the tactical radar warning that there were two - no three - Hind gunships approaching the town from the North, no doubt carrying troops as well. The bastards had called for reinforcements to continue the butchery.

Transitioning to forward flight and firewalling the throttles, she had got within AMRAAM range of the ground attack choppers and taken all three of them out before they got within weapons range of the town and its celebrating people. But her mind was already screaming. It was all going to go wrong. She couldn't fight off the entire Uzbek state security apparatus on her own. And eventually, they'd take their revenge on the town for what she had done there. And she didn't think that there would be any survivors left to hate her for what she had brought down on them.

She frantically patrolled the approaches to the town, aware that she was burning up fuel and couldn't stay on station forever. Then she spotted a convoy of trucks and armoured personnel carriers coming up the road towards the town, and she could see the heavily armed interior ministry troops on board, ready to punish the inhabitants for her sins.

She had made attack run after attack run the length of the convoy, strafing and bombing and rocketing, and dodging bullets and shoulder launched anti-aircraft missiles. The road was littered with burning vehicles and corpses. But all too quickly, she had expended all of her ordnance, and could only watch impotently as the survivors climbed onto the remaining serviceable vehicles and resumed their journey towards the town.

She'd realised that she would never stop them now. All she had thought she could do was to warn the townspeople.

She had tried.

She had buzzed the town, waggling her wings frantically, three times. Then she realised that the townspeople were outside, frenziedly waving and cheering at her. She used the radio to broadcast a warning in broken Russian on as many frequencies as she could.

Nobody was listening.

And then the interior ministry trucks had rolled in to town and up the main street and the shooting had started. This time, as she watched in mounting horror, some of the people had armed themselves with weapons dropped by the troops and policemen she had slain. But they had obviously been no match for trained soldiers with armoured support. Then Shego got a tactical radar warning of a squadron of incoming Mig 29s. The Uzbek air-force had finally got in on the act. And with only one air-to-air missile left, no gun ammunition and barely enough juice to make it back to the fuel dump where she was meeting Drakken, she had to leave.

She pushed the stick forward, throttled back to save fuel, went right down to the deck, and flew away from the town at tree top height; a town that she hadn't even known the name of, and still didn't.

Alone in the cockpit, twisting and turning near the ground as the mountains flashed by above, Shego had cried very private and bitter tears.

All she had later told Drakken was that she had 'had a bit of trouble'.

She had cut herself off from news of Uzbekistan. She didn't want to know what the government there were doing, or had done. Nor, specifically, did she ever want to read about the massacre of the entire population of the town she had last seen burning over her shoulder as she flew away from it; because she felt responsible. Just like she did now for what had happened with the Little Diablos. But now, Uzbekistan wanted her. They wanted her in one of those dungeons, to torture in revenge for what she had done to their apparatus of butchery. They had tortured her mentally already by what they had done to the town as she watched. Now they wanted to torture her physically. Or perhaps they just wanted to kill her in a particularly horrible way, live on state television, because she was a symbol of resistance.

That... was not unexpected. One day she would have to deal with her Uzbek demons; probably violently. But for today, her rage was reserved and channelled for whoever wanted to knowingly hand her over to these grotesque people, helpless and unconscious, to be tortured, dismembered,murdered.

For a moment she had been tempted to sling the foot soldiers who were travelling on the plane with her out of the door at 40,000 feet. Not a good way to die, watching the ground come closer and closer and knowing you are going to hit it very hard in a few seconds.

Then she remembered the little league game and she relented. It wasn't the kids fault that his father was an apologist for murderers and torturers. She'd make sure that he'd be able to spend a lot more time with the kid in the near future; in several casts, maybe, but quality time nonetheless. But one way or the other she'd find out who had ordered them to do this to her. And then she'd make time to pay them a little visit.

And fuck up their whole damned day.

oOo

Judging two and a half hours in your head isn't easy, but Shego was fortunate that at about the time she thought that two and a half hours had passed, she heard the engine note subtly change as the pilot throttled back for the long descent.

"Showtime!"

Shego very carefully charged her hands, manipulating the electromagnetic flux around them to keep the superheated plasma very close to the skin of her hands, and away from the metal of the globes, globes which concealed the powerful build-up of plasma from the eyes of her jailers.

She had to be careful to keep the energy away from the metal because although her skin was immune to the plasma that she generated from her hands, which were themselves miraculously unaffected by the extreme temperatures they generated, the heat of objects that she had heated up with that plasma would still burn other parts of her body, like her wrists, severely. And, as she had discovered to her cost before, large full thickness burns required a skin graft to fix them, even if the skin was green. She kept maintaining the electromagnetic flux and pumping more and more power into the layer near her hands. She built it up until it was so intense that she could start to smell the ozone as it ionized the air around her. Then she took a number of very quiet deep breaths, culminating in a big one that she held. Then, she let the raw, stored power in her left hand go, in one focussed blast to her left hand side.

There was a loud explosion, as a bolt of superheated plasma burnt straight through the end of the titanium globe on her right hand and then out through the skin of the plane, creating a fist sized hole. At 48,000 feet, there was instantaneous explosive decompression, and the plane lurched nose down into a steep dive as the pilots executed the emergency descent that Shego was hoping would give her the time to free herself and deal with the two men she'd heard talking, and any others that she hadn't. She had continued to pour power into her right hand to the point where it would have been too bright to look at, and then she just pulled her hand towards her, through the wrist restraint, vapourising the titanium alloy like it was ice turning to steam, and then she allowed all that energy to just dissipate as she grabbed for the hood over her head with her now no longer burning hand and ripped it clear. Just in time to brace herself as a man in a polyester suit flew towards her after losing his grip on a leather seat back. He slammed into her midriff and Shego bellowed as the bruises Kimmy had given her flared. Touching two fingers to the forehead of the man pinned to her, and who was frantically scrabbling inside his jacket, she zapped him into unconsciousness.

His companion was meanwhile strapped in to a seat facing away from her, and he was fumbling with an oxygen mask that had dropped down from above his head. His task was made harder by the P9 in his hand. Once he had the mask over his mouth and nose, he looked round - straight into Shegos eyes. He swung the weapon around to aim at her, but she beat him to the draw, a plasma bolt knocking the pistol out of his hands and throwing it into the corner. Frantically, he unclipped the seat belt and dived after it, and Shego helped him quickly on his way with a blast of plasma. He slammed hard into the cockpit door and collapsed, unconscious.

Shego blew across the tip of her finger, gunfighter style, then grabbed the oxygen mask that was designed to serve one of the seats that had been removed to make room for the quite impressive collapsible titanium crucifix that she had been secured to. After a couple of deep breaths, she briskly and effic iently released herself from the restraints.

While she waited for the plane to descend to below 10,000 feet and level off, she reached into the jacket of the man slumped at her feet and pulled out the P9 that he had been frantically fumbling for earlier, and casually flicked the magazine release to drop the clip on the floor, then racked the slide with her thumb, ejecting the chambered round, and finally lit her hand and screwed the melting pistol up like it was an empty soda can, and tossed it away.

The engines stopped screaming and the descent slowed, so clearly they were back into breathable air. She walked, waddling slightly thanks to the damned diaper which was chafing somewhat, up the aisle towards the other spook, and stopped, surprised.

She was not alone.

There was another passenger, sitting chained to a seat, in an orange jumpsuit, with a bag over his head. She pulled the bag clear, looking in case it was somebody she recognised.

The unknown man woke up, looked around groggily at the unconscious escort - Shego guessed that he hadn't been quite as lucky with the whole finger up the tradesman's entrance thing as she had - and slurred "God is great!" in Arabic, before closing his eyes and returning to the land of nod.

She'd have to let him go, she decided. He could be a dangerous and committed Al Quaeda terrorist, but knowing the kind of people in charge at Guantanemo he'd probably once delivered a pizza to Osama Bin Laden's third cousin or something. Either way, he didn't deserve being handed over to be boiled alive by the Uzbek torturers.

The internal phone started to ring. She ignored it.

She waddled up the aisle, fuming with every soggy, diaper-rash affected step, and repeated the impressive crushing trick with the P9 that she had blasted out of the other agent's hand. That agent groaned and moved, so she reached down and gave him the zap on the forehead. With most people, that gave her an hour or two before they woke up, which in this case would be more than enough time. She cursorily searched the man, discovering a US passport, drivers licence and credit cards in a name that might or might not have been genuine. She also found $800 US in cash in the man's wallet, which she stuffed into the breast pocket of the extremely unflattering orange jumpsuit. She'd need some cash for a new wardrobe when she hit civilisation.

And some baby powder.

The internal phone started to ring again. Once again she ignored it.

Then she spotted the briefcase. In a flash she had it in front of her and had burnt the locks open. She was rewarded by a sheaf of documentation bearing the crest of the Central Intelligence Agency, including an 'intelligence report' on her which on a brief skim seemed to have been written by an illiterate fantasist who knew little or nothing about her or her activities, and another on the other passenger, which she gave little credibility to in light of what they had said about her, but had him down as a possible extremist from Algeria who had been captured in Afghanistan.

It quickly became clear that the US were sending the other guy with a name she could not pronounce to the Uzbeks to see if they could get him to admit his links to Al Quaeda. She had no doubt that they could. In great detail.

Whether he had any links to start with or not.

She also came across the print out of telex correspondence not 8 hours old where the CIA had advertised the fact that they had captured Shego and were looking to ship her abroad, and the Uzbeks had replied saying that they wanted her 'in connection with domestic terrorism in Uzbekistan'.

Evil bastards.

Time to take the plane.

She fired up her hands, and silently burnt the lock of the steel cockpit door out, before yanking it open. The co-pilot reacted first, looking over his shoulder and then plunging his hand into the pocket beside his seat and emerging with a small revolver, obviously designed as the last line of defence against terrorist hijackers storming the cockpit. He never got to pull the trigger - Shego had covered the space between the cockpit door and the co-pilot in half a second, and gone for a pressure point in his neck with an expertly delivered knife-hand punch. She was able to take the pistol from his limp hand as he slumped back in his seat. Meanwhile, the Captain was yelling "Cockpit breach! Cockpit breach!" into her headset, continuously repeating the same phrase as if stuck in a loop caused by terror. Or she was until Shego casually cut the wire to her headset with a little flicker of plasma anyway. "Please don't...", she said. "I'm just... I just fly the plane!" she added, plaintively. "Be my guest" said Shego, as she emptied the cartridges from the revolver and melted it into a paperweight. "Just hold this altitude and heading until I say differently, OK?"

The pilot nodded, and concentrated on the controls, as Shego zapped the co-pilot on the forehead, after first removing his headset and releasing his harness. She yanked him up and over the back of his flight seat by his belt and collar, dumping him in the cabin. Then she slammed the steel cockpit door and spot- welded it shut with her finger. "Right!" said Shego, as she vaulted over the back of and into the co-pilots seat and landed with a rather unpleasant sounding squelch. "It looks like you're doing a damned fine job here!" she added, to the shivering captain, as she fastened the quick-release harness. "But..." she added, reaching out, "I have control!" as she zapped the pilot on the temple and she slumped back in her seat. By the time she awoke, Shego knew reckoned she would be long gone. Probably - she compared her stature critically with that of the unconscious pilot - in what she was wearing. Although she'd steal some clean underwear from the woman's flight bag which was stowed behind her seat, she had noticed.

Relaxing, Shego did a quick sweep of the instruments, looking for any problems or issues.

There was plenty of fuel. There obviously had been tailwinds. More than enough to make the African mainland, in fact - so that was what she decided to do. She also noticed that the vibration sensor on the port engine was indicating a slightly high reading; probably caused by ingesting lumps of aluminium and the other detritus that had been sucked out of the hole in the skin that she had burned.

Ideally, she'd shut the engine down, but she took a pragmatic risk, spooling it down to idle, so that it was available if she needed the power, but wouldn't rip the tail off the plane if it siezed or broke up.

She spooled the starboard engine up to compensate. Then she reached down and zapped the transponder with her finger. The transponder that had been set to squawk an automated distress code onto radar screens up and down coastal Africa, and even as far north as the Canary Islands, presumably, since she had blown a hole in the side of the plane.

It would squawk no more.

She grabbed the headphones and put them on her head, expecting to hear very little. She was mistaken.

"Boxcar seven, this is Hammer one - seven, challenge break five alpha, please authenticate and respond."

Somebody was clearly talking to her. Or actually, to the sleeping pilot alongside her.

"Boxcar seven, this is Hammer one - seven, I say again, challenge break five alpha, please authenticate and respond."

She didn't know who or where Hammer one - seven was, but Shego decided that silence was the best policy.

"Hammer one - seven, nothing heard..."

She knew that she could make landfall in mainland Africa within 20 minutes, so unless they had had a fighter already shadowing them, or an aircraft carrier sitting more or less directly between them and the coast of North Africa, she be feet dry in 20 minutes and flying low enough to be undetected, then landing somewhere convenient where she could lose herself.

It was just at that moment that the first missile hit.

There was an enormous bang from the rear of the plane, the controls were almost wrenched out of her hands and the jet yawed drastically to starboard and started to roll, with massive vibrations kicking at her hands and feet.

As Shego fought to control the almost uncontrollable, the warning lights on the panel lit up like a Christmas tree, a cacophony of buzzers, horns and klaxons competed loudly with each other, and a digitised voice started reciting a list of critical failures. A quick scan showed that the port engine warnings were all lit, from oil pressure through fire to turbine over-speed, that there was a major fuel leak and that two of the three independent hydraulic circuits to the tail had lost pressure. The starboard engine was still running, and she deftly switched its fuel supply to the one tank that wasn't leaking, then hit the button to kill the shrieking audible warnings. She wasn't quite sure what had happened, but had an idea. Still wrestling with the yoke, she looked back towards the tail out of her cockpit side window, to see an empty space where she expected the edge of the port engine to be, and a trail of flames and black smoke behind the stricken plane.

And she also saw, between two clouds, the unmistakeable silhouette of an F14 some way back on her port quarter, with big drop tanks under its wings and fuselage. And as she watched, she saw the bloom of flame from under its wing as another missile left its rack.

"Shit!".

They had had a fighter shadow. And this was what their orders must be if the human cargo ever took over the plane. Hammer one - seven was just cleaning house. There was no way of cheating the inevitable. The plane was lost. Everybody on board was almost certainly dead, unless she could save them or even herself; which was unlikely if the plane exploded in mid air.

She took a calculated last-ditch risk, and pulled a violent wing-over, an evasive manoeuvre more suited to a fully stressed and aerobatically rated fighter plane, and that she knew well exceeded the wing loading limits of the already crippled business jet. The gamble was that the wings would stay on, and that she was able to buy some time by dodging the missile.

She lost the bet.

A new alarm started as she hauled on the stick and kicked the rudder pedal, along with the calm computerised voice saying "Airframe! Stress!" repeatedly. There were various terminal sounding creaking and groaning noises but Shego ignored them, as the plane pulled up and over to starboard. She had to, otherwise they were dead for sure. Then the already damaged horizontal stabilizer broke away from the tail with a bang, the plane lurched uncontrollably into an even more violent manoeuvre and the port wing folded at the root like it was made of paper. She felt both failures through the controls, and heard the screech of the tortured main spar crying enough.

"And that's all she wrote..." thought Shego.

Relieved of one wing, the plane would have inevitably violently spun into the sea, shedding parts and wreckage, like a giant metal sycamore seed. That's if the second missile hadn't slammed into the fuselage and triggered an explosion that blew the stricken plane apart in a giant fireball.

The cockpit section, with Shego and the unconscious pilot strapped into their seats, was severed from the fuselage by the blast, and tumbled lazily towards the sea, 10,000 feet below, in amongst a shower of other burning wreckage.

There was silence now, apart from the increasing roar of the wind. Shego realised that in a little over a minute, the cockpit section was going to plunge into the sea at roughly 150mph. This was not going to be a surviveable impact.

Shego turned to the unconscious pilot, strapped into the seat adjacent to her, and spoke sincerely.

"Sorry."


	6. Monkey Magic

The breeze from across the harbour rippled the fabric of the silk tent and kept the black and gold flags on the poles atop the temporary structure streaming. Lucy Mau yawned, then shook her head to try to clear it. She'd been up at five this morning, down at the jetty here by half past six, and mucking in with the drivers and riggers to help lay the stage and the carpeting, erect the tent and plumb in the electricity and the computers. This definitely wasn't her job, she told herself. If she'd wanted to put up tents at 7am in the pissing rain, she'd have joined the circus, not a professional sounding facilities management company. She was a 'Conference Co-ordinator', not a rigger, not a lighting technician, not a sparks, not a chippie. The job title sounded great, but the pay was crap, and she spent half her life trying to look immaculate and professional while dealing with the clients, and half her life with a mouth full of nails and wielding a hammer, trying to compensate for her boss going cheap on the tradesmen.

She suspected that Mr Nakajame had known exactly what he was doing when he casually asked her about her 24 month stint as a roadie with a heavy metal band after college, and then hired her 'at a low salary until she had some experience'. If she hadn't been sleeping with the bass guitarist and helping the band polish off the prodigious rider every night, she'd never have stuck at it - the work had been dirty, dangerous and damned hard. And along the way she had learnt to rig lighting, set up and run a mixing desk and build a stage set, not to mention roll a mean spliff and pick out the right groupies from the front of the stage to enliven the after show party. And now she was experiencing deja vu. Except that the best she could hope for these days was an indecent and unappetising proposal from some rotund middle-aged business man, and all the stale canapes she could eat. And she probably wouldn't get home until pushing midnight tonight. It was getting towards time to shut things down and start dismantling the desk and striking the tent, ready for it all to be loaded back onto the trucks that had brought them in this very morning. But first the client's own people would have to dismantle their equipment and get it out. And they couldn't start doing that for another ten minutes, the official closing time for the centre. Any conference delegate not signed in by half-four this afternoon wasn't going anywhere.

So far she had personally ticked 62 people off in the database she had set up. There were three similar centres being run by colleagues of hers, all linked by various bits of technology back to the central server back in the office, and she could see that there were only three no-shows so far from the entire list of 317 invited attendees. Which was a pretty amazing hit rate for any convention she'd ever run. In fact, best she'd ever managed was some dreary international sales conference for computer leasing or something, where they had given everybody who even turned up an equal chance to win a Ferrari. That had achieved a stunning 94% attendance level. They'd run out of goodie bags and had had to rush-order some more at hideous cost during the lunch break. Fortunately no goodie bags to run out of here. In fact, the whole setup was deeply weird.

Firstly, they'd been hired on the spot by a man who had walked in off the street with a briefcase containing a detailed spec for the reception centres and a large number of genuine Gold Krugerands with which he paid for the entire exercise up front.

Secondly, all they'd been told about the client was that his name was Lo Pin, and that he demanded absolute confidentiality until after the event had concluded.

Thirdly, when they'd set up the tent this morning and the client's own people had arrived to fit it out with crates of their own equipment, they were a weird bunch; very unapproachable, almost menacing. And the stuff they were setting up - all very odd. She recognised the metal detector well enough, but some of the other things - well, they looked like strange alien body scanners or something. And then there was a huge security crew that looked like they'd been caught halfway between a karate dojo and a fashion show, with stylish two-tone blue karate gi's, each with a large version of the emblem on the two flags fluttering above embroidered on the back. They seemed to be there to keep delegates and luggage that hadn't been through the scanners well away from people and luggage that had, until sampans arrived at the jetty to collect them. Fourthly, and most bizarrely of all, the delegates themselves were the weirdest bunch of misfits she had ever seen. Each of them who came to her desk to sign in was carrying an ebony card, with a gold pictogram on the front, and with their identity on the back. Some of the cards were for named individuals, others said things like 'nominated representative of the thingummy school' or 'champion of the doohicky dojo' or even 'the leading practitioner of somesuch style'. But they were the weirdest bunch of people she had ever seen. People in saffron robes, people in figure-hugging body suits, people with bizarre hair arrangements and people with no hair at all, plus at least one 8 foot tall, 5 foot wide guy who must have weighed at least 300kg if not more, and had to hunch himself up really small to fit through the metal detector arch. But the weirdest of the weird was a man who had at first seemed utterly normal. A most charming and debonair englishman walked in, introduced himself in a gorgeous english accent as "Lord Fiske", and then passed over a card addressed to "The Right Honourable The Lord Montgomery Fiske, 16th Baron Fiske". With, although she still found it hard to comprehend, the hands of a monkey. It was all she could do not to scream! Instead, without skipping a beat, she had smiled, and said "Thank you, my lord, and welcome. If you'll just step over there to see that gentleman by the metal detector..." Yes indeed. She had ice water in her veins. Nothing phased her. 5 minutes left. Break-down shouldn't take too long, she mused, provided all those security hard-men pitched in to help get the client's weird equipment out the way.

And then it happened. She lost the power of speech. Adonis himself had just strolled into the tent, and she just couldn't take her eyes off him. He was around six and a half feet tall, wearing a simple black one-piece garment which did nothing to conceal the solidly toned musculature beneath it, his arms were like beautifully proportioned tree-trunks, his legs like exquisitely carved granite columns, his eyes were deep and intense, his face just so cute, but so powerful, and his package looked..

'Oh god! Focus, woman! Act like a professional! He's coming to the desk!', she told herself. She felt herself blushing, and blushed even more. Adonis reached the desk and said just one word. "Hi!" But he said it in the most amazingly deep, powerful, sexy, spine tingling voice. Like somewhere between James Earl Jones and Barry White, but perhaps ten times sexier than either and with a little tinge of Japanese accent overlaid. He could read the weather forecast in that voice, and she'd wet herself just listening. "Ng" she said, as she held her hand out to take the card. He obligingly reached inside his Gi to pull out the card with a little smile. And the little smile made her heart do a double backflip and her loins moistened most embarrassingly. She couldn't blush any more brightly. And then the vision of glorious beauty before her put the card in her hand, and she noticed the way the pectoral muscles moved under the garment covering his chest, and she just stared, wide-eyed for a second, just unable to remember what she had been about to say. Then she remembered. "Th - Th - Th - Th". She took the card, and maintained eye contact with the greek god who stood before her. "Err... Miss?" he said, after an indeterminate delay. "Yes?" she replied dreamily. And then suddenly realised that she was losing the plot, and snatched her eyes down to the card, where it said "Representative of the Sensei of the Yamanouchi School". She looked up and her lips definitely moved in a way that was consistent with asking him his name, but her vocal chords seemed to have siezed up. Eventually the word "Name?" did pass her slack jaws. "Saru Chounouryoku" he said, the timbre of his voice indirectly causing a significant damp spot on her chair. "Y... Y..." she tried to say, as the bottom lip of her half open mouth vibrated ineffectually, and she indicated the direction of the metal detector.

"Bon Diggedy!" said Adonis, momentarily breaking the spell. And then he smiled at her before he turned away, and she grinned back foolishly. She sighed dreamily, and quite loudly, before noticing that the man clearly had buns of steel. Then she just stared, mouth lolling half open, while he walked away from her. And then she realised that she had just made that noise out loud. And that at least two members of the so-far stony faced security detail were smirking at her in great amusement. But she didn't care. The radio-linked alarm clock that she was using to ensure that she got the timings absolutely correct, as per the contract, bleeped at her to indicate closing up time, so she placed the "Closed" sign up on the counter, and asked the two smirking security men if they would mind closing and sealing the flap on the tent, which they begrudgingly did. She went back to the database to check how many no shows there were; none. And then the next second, the entire database had vanished. And then the server went offline. And then the machine on her desk suddenly went dark, and smoke billowed briefly from several parts of the case of the system unit.

"Oh just great!" she said, aghast "Bang goes another profit margin. Which would mean that yet again, there will be no bonus and no commission." she told herself. Dammit, she needed another job, and soon. "Does Mr Chounouryoku need a personal masseuse?" she thought, rather enjoying the associated mental imagery. She grabbed the bag with her emergency knickers, jeans, trainers and sweat-shirt in, and headed for one of the portaloos. She needed to freshen up a little, scrub her make-up off and get changed as part of turning herself back into Lucy-the-roadie. And while she was in there she might well have to take care of a little something. Otherwise she'd not be concentrating on anything until she got home tonight!


	7. The Wolsberg Concordat

7. The Wolsberg Concordat

"Compartmentalise... compartmentalise...", Kim continued to talk to herself sternly, as she entered the elevator on level 4, after a rather self-absorbed lunch in the Global Justice canteen, en route to Dr Director's office.

Her legs were still a little wobbly.

Compartmentalising was the story of Kim's life. Normally she was brilliant at it, though she said so herself. How else could she so easily concentrate on history homework or designing page layouts for the school yearbook while en-route to tangle with some mad lunatic bent on taking over the world? But now she had two big compartments stuffed with things relating to Shego. One firmly locked compartment was full of the way Kim had just completely 'lost it' for a minute or two, on the roof of the Bueno Nacho HQ, and deliberately and maliciously done something she never would have believed herself capable of that could have killed Shego. Definitely would have killed anybody else. And pretending it hadn't happened just wasn't working for her. And now after her shower before lunch there was another compartment chock full of Shego... and she didn't even dare think about that at the moment. And she was going to have to think about all of it. And deal.

On her own.

The first because what she had done had terrified her so much when she later thought about it that she hadn't had the courage to articulate it clearly to herself yet, let alone talk to Mon or Ron or Mom about it. And the second... well, no. Just… No. If she could have talked to anybody about it, it would have been Ron. There was nothing they couldn't have talked about, when he had been 'just' her best friend. They had shared everything. They had even literally been inside each other's skin for a few days, once. But now they were dating, it really wasn't a subject she could imagine discussing with him. She suddenly remembered Ron's reaction when he had first seen a still from video footage of Shego in action; that predatory lust-fuelled growl. She felt a pang of irrational jealousy as she mentally paired Shego with her boyfriend. "Stop it, right now Kim!", she scolded herself.

She forced herself to think about the upcoming briefing. That would probably help take her mind elsewhere, she decided. In due course, she found herself outside the door of Dr Director's office and pushed the button, looking at the camera focused on her. A DNA scanner and fingerprint reader in the bell-push confirmed her identity via a display built in to Betty Director's desk, and seconds later the door hissed open to admit her. She strolled into the room, about to say "Hi", when she was surprised to see Wade's wide-eyed face on the giant wall-mounted view screen. "Hi Wade, what's the sitch?" she asked, cheerily, noticing only then that Dr Director had a somewhat stern face.

"I was just about to ask how you penetrated four levels of NSA certified firewall and evaded several intrusion detection systems to get into my private A1-secure video conferencing terminal, Mr Load. However, I'll settle for 'the sitch' for now..."

"Sorry Dr Director, but it was important", Wade apologised. "Kim! Your Kimmunicator was turned off, I tried to reach you. I thought you'd want to know."

"Know what, Wade?", Kim asked warily.

"It's Shego. She's presumed dead, Kim!" , said Wade.

"Oh god, no!" exclaimed Kim, tearing up as a rush of completely unexpected emotion struck her; followed by the sudden stab of icy fear. Had Kim killed her? Had she been more injured than she seemed when Kim had last seen her?

"Indeed. A clear breach of the Concordat." said Dr Director, icily, seemingly having missed the nature of the emotion behind Kim's outburst. Kim for her part didn't trust herself to try and speak. Betty

Director pushed a button on her desk and said "Agent Simpson, have the CIA responded to our official query yet?" "Yes", came an electronic voice from speakers throughout the room. "They are claiming that some of their agents were attacked by Shego during an unrelated intelligence operation in Africa, and that they killed her under the self defence provisions of the concordat, Doctor Director."

Kim was completely wrong-footed by that. "The CIA?" she muttered, in a confused tone.

"Yes they would say that, wouldn't they. Thank you Simpson!". Betty Director pressed the button again to kill the link, and then said "So, does that tally with what you know, Mr Load?"

"No.. no, not at all. I'm uploading you everything I've got from their systems. It should be with you... now. It looks like they convinced the state patrol to hand Shego over by impersonating Global Justice agents, then they took her to an abandoned air force field, drugged her and put her on a plane to Uzbekistan. Then it seems something went wrong mid flight, and they had to shoot the plane down."

"Uzb... idiots!" said Dr Director, vehemently. Then she looked at Wade on the big screen. "Is there any chance she might have survived?"

"I don't know", said Wade. "I do know they have recovered a lot of wreckage but haven't found her body yet, and that they have had three naval underwater search teams on station looking for it. But I have found some gun camera footage from the incident. Do you want to see it?"

"Please and thank-you, Wade" interjected Kim, who had managed to get the rawest of her emotions back under some semblance of control.

Wade vanished to be replaced by the image of a glowing aircraft HUD, overlaid on fluffy clouds and blue sky, and in the middle of the picture a medium sized executive jet, with a boxed diamond icon superimposed on it. The soundtrack was a cacophony of odd beeps and darth-vader breathing noises, and then a voice drawled "Hammer one - seven, nothing heard...". A second voice, presumably the RIO, said "Claw, does that mean we have to take them out?" "I'm damned well gonna get confirmation of that" responded the pilot, who then got on the radio again. "AWACS

Alpha Echo, this is Hammer One - Seven, have you been monitoring radio traffic between ourselves and Boxcar Seven, over?"

"AWACS Alpha Echo, Affirmative, we have been monitoring and have notified COMAFAIR, over!", responded the AWACS operator, hunched over his radar screen in the back of a far off Boeing 707.

"Hammer One - Seven, please advise, over!", the pilot asked, plaintively. Kim got the impression that he knew what he had to do but wanted somebody else to make the call. There was another pause, more beeping and heavy breathing, and then a voice came back over the air, slightly wobbly. "AWACS Alpha Echo, COMAFAIR confirms that Presidential Order Victor-One-Five-Two-Seven-Alpha does apply. Execute with extreme prejudice most urgent, over!".

"Hammer One - Seven, Roger, Out!" said the pilot, sounding slightly less cool and professional than he had earlier in the film.

"Shit!" said the RIO sharply. Then, in a more business-like tone of voice, he added "Master arm switch to on. Sidewinder selected. Pickle is hot!" A clear tone came from the speakers, mingling with the heavy breathing noises.

"Good tone!" said the pilot. Then there was a burst of static, and the screen filled with smoke for a moment as a missile streaked away from the camera's viewpoint towards the cruising jet. "Fox one!" said the pilot, almost mournfully. Seconds later, the screen filled with a huge bloom of flame as the left hand rear engine of the executive jet exploded spectacularly and suddenly the images on the screen were rotating wildly, as apparently the pilot felt the need to dodge chunks of debris.

Seconds later, the screen stabilised again, this time with the burning executive jet off to the right of it. The video showed an engine missing, and the tail full of big holes, with smoke and flames streaming from the rear fuselage. "Sidewinder selected" said the RIO, and the continuous tone started again.

"Fox 2" said the pilot, even less enthusiastically than before, after another burst of static as the screen filled with smoke again. Suddenly the RIO said "Woah! Boxcar has gone evasive!", as the burning aircraft flipped up and to the right, straining to get out of the path of the missile that was tracking it, and the pilot of the F14 had to be quick to keep the jet in the field of view of the gun camera.

"That's Shego..." said Dr Director, almost under her breath.

A second or two later, the plane just seemed to fold up in the air and hang there for a second, followed immediately by a large explosion as the missile caught up with it. A millisecond after the missile blast, there was another much bigger detonation and a fireball that almost filled the screen, with pieces of aircraft being flung in all directions, as the pilot of Hammer One - Seven pulled massive G forces that had him grunting in order to avoid the edge of the expanding fireball.

"Fuel tank..." muttered Dr Director, redundantly...

"Splash one." said the pilot, once the fighter had regained some equilibrium, but in a voice that sounded like somebody delivering a eulogy. Then the film cut and Wade was back on the screen, looking impassive as always.

Kim just stared wide-eyed, an anguished expression on her face. She'd just watched the brutal, fiery death of her nemesis. She hadn't expected to feel like it was somebody she really cared about. Once again, she didn't trust herself to speak. So much for compartmentalisation!

Fortunately, Dr Director filled the void. She hit a button on her desk with some venom and barked "Get me the Director of Central Intelligence on the hotline, right now!". "Err... please, Janice" she added more softly, realising that she had unintentionally barked at the woman on the other end of the intercom. "Normally, I'd ask you to step outside while I made this call, but I know that you'd just ask Mr Load to play you a recording of it afterwards if I did that". Wade had the good grace to look sheepish at this point. "So you can stay. But not a word!" she said, looking at Kim.

A few seconds later, a disembodied voice emanated from the main speakers. "Dr Director! To what do I owe this pleasure?"

Dr. Director snatched a handset from her desk cutting off the speakers. Apparently, Kim was only going to hear one half of the conversation.

"Ah, Mr Director. I trust you are settling in nicely?" she asked, her pleasant voice belied by a facial expression that might melt granite. "Glad to hear it." she said, soothingly. "Now, there was just one little thing actually..." Her voice took on a steel edge as she continued. "I'm sure that when you took up your new appointment, you felt that a Harvard MBA and a copy of 'The New American Century' were entirely sufficient to properly equip you for its many challenges, but somebody should have mentioned that there was some required reading; starting with the treaties and obligations that bind you, and specifically the Wolsberg Concordat."

Kim heard the righteous indignation pouring out of the telephone earpiece, if not the individual words, from the other side of the room.

"No, Mr Director, Shego is on the Y-list, and that puts her in Global Justice's jurisdiction, and out of yours. Had you read the concordat, you would know that. Had you read the background brief your staff prepared for you when you took your new post, you'd know exactly why the USA, and the CIA, signed and have continued to participate in the concordat."

There was more outraged sounding barking from the earpiece of the phone.

"Well, Mr Director" said Dr Director, softly at first but building to an angry crescendo, "there are several reasons, but one major one is that it AVOIDS THIS KIND OF UNFORGIVEABLE FIVE-STAR OCEAN GOING CLUSTERFUCK!"

Kim was shocked; she had never heard Dr Director use profanity before. There was a longer pause, as Kim surmised that a slightly chastened director of the CIA was plaintively defending his position.

Dr Director listened impatiently but then continued, quietly but icily. "Well, Mr Director, from the top. Our analysis of security camera footage and the memory cores of several damaged synthodrones has confirmed that Shego did not plan or have prior knowledge of the nature of the operation that you are referring to. In fact, she was deliberately kept out of the loop. If you had read the psychological evaluations and threat reports we routinely send you as a member of the concordat, you would know that any involvement in a scheme on her part with so much potential for death and destruction was extremely unlikely.

"Secondly, if you had read the threat reports on Shego, you'd never have made such an ill-judged, amateur attempt to render her. It was pre-planned to fail. The deaths of your agents, the flight crew, Shego and the other detainee are your responsibility.

"Thirdly, if you'd read any of those after action reports we've sent to you in recent years - and I heartily recommend number 40317 - you'd know why the Uzbeks wanted Shego. And again, if you'd read her psychological evaluations – I recommend particularly the section starting on page 38 - you'd know that having done what you've done, in the way that you have done it, then you'd better damned well hope that she really is dead. And if I was you, until I had the body on a slab in the mortuary, I'd not be sleeping too well; or at all".

Kim's heart did a little back-flip. "Alive? Is that even possible?" she asked herself.

Meanwhile, Mr Director had obviously asked a question, and Dr Director was keen to answer. "Because Shego would take what you just tried to do to her very personally indeed. And she would undoubtedly retaliate violently against you and the Agency. And frankly, that scares me. But it should absolutely terrify you. And after she has finished reducing your Langley campus to a smoking ruin, and dismembering your organisation, I expect she would be looking for you personally. And then... well, I really wouldn't want to be you. So keep looking for that body. But you may want to put your affairs in order, just in case."

Betty Director's smirk told Kim that she had made the Director of Central Intelligence sweat a little bit.

"Please tell me that Shego might have really survived..." thought Kim.

"No, Mr Director. Global Justice will not intercede on your behalf in that eventuality. Because, under the terms of the concordat, which we are as much bound by as you are, you are guilty of at least five clear breaches of your obligations. Starting with impersonation of Global Justice agents, moving through operating against a Y-list entity, and ending with lying to us about your involvement. Your membership is therefore summarily suspended pending a full report to the wider membership. The CIA is now officially on its own.

"After this call, I will be speaking to the chair of the Senate Intelligence Select Committee, to brief him on exactly what the CIA has done, what the consequences may be, and on our response. I will also asking him to show just cause why we should consider only your agency in breach and not the USA as a whole.

"I'm sure that he will be pleased to hear that you sanctioned a flagrant breach of the National Security Act, have got the CIA thrown out of the concordat of which it was a founder member, which has helped protect the USA for the last half century, and have exposed the nation to the risk of retribution from at least one dangerous Y-list entity if not others. I wouldn't be at all surprised if your next federal government appointment is cleaning dried gum off the underside of benches in the capitol building. Good day!"

With that parting shot, Dr Director slammed down the phone. "Amateur!" she spat, vehemently.

Kim couldn't contain herself. She had to ask. "Could Shego be alive?"

Dr Director looked at her strangely before replying, as if noticing Kim's somewhat emotional state for the first time. "Well, you saw the footage. At the same time, this is Shego, and there is no body yet, so anything is possible. I'll have the lab analyse anything we get. But if she did turn up alive, then we really would have a problem! I'm afraid we'd almost certainly need to take her out ourselves".

"Take her out? You mean kill her?" asked Kim, aghast. "But why?"

"To protect the concordat, which would never survive a Y-list entity brazenly attacking the foreign intelligence service of the world's only superpower, especially if she does significant damage. And the end of the concordat would put the safety of the whole world at serious risk."

"If I knew what 'the concordat' was, or 'the Y-list' come to that, I might have understood that. What are you talking about?"

"This is all highly classified, Kim..." admonished Dr Director. Kim cynically applied the puppy-dog pout, but Dr Director held firm, shaking her head.

"Oh well", shrugged Kim with a grimace, "I'll just have to ask Wade later".

"Oh alright!" said Dr Director, testily.

"Please and thank-you!" said Kim, sweetly.

"First, a history lesson. During the Second World War, various individuals with... special abilities and a.. unique outlook on life... were co-opted by all sides to form part of their respective war efforts. After hostilities, many of these individuals and groups went independent.

"Some took names like 'The Green Flash' and 'The Ghost', others were scientists who continued their bizarre, dangerous, sometimes macabre wartime projects for their own purposes. Still others were wartime special operatives who just couldn't hang it up when the shooting stopped, and continued, for good, evil or just for the hell of it.

"In the community... the intelligence community, I mean... these people and organisations were lumped together under the banner of 'freelance entities'.

"As the cold war replaced the world war, and former allies became implacable enemies across the iron curtain, these freelance entities were a frightening variable for all sides. Everybody could count divisions, tanks, nuclear bombers, submarines. Nobody knew how to measure a mad scientist's death ray project, for example, to work out what was an appropriate balancing force. And at a stroke, that balance could shift, bringing instability to the delicate balance that was stopping each side from blowing the other to bits.

"In addition, attempts to either harness the power of these entities to your own side or destroy them to prevent them working for the other side were fraught with risk. Risk of betrayal, or risk of an operation backfiring and driving your target into the arms of your enemy.

"For example, the British Government once had to declare a Scottish Island had been 'contaminated by wartime weapons tests' and would be uninhabitable for 50 years after an attack by MI6 on a mad scientist's lair there resulted in an Anthrax release, the deaths of 12 agents and 30 soldiers, and the target going to work for the Soviets designing nerve agents in order to take his revenge.

"But the real wildcard that scared all parties was that one of these independent freelance entities - villains, heroes, business operations – would launch some scheme that would be mistaken by somebody else as an attack from the other side of the iron curtain, accidentally triggering World

War III. To counter this, intelligence agencies from both sides of the iron curtain used to attempt to pool their intelligence on the freelance entities, and share information about them. The trouble was that it is very hard to be spying on and deceiving your mortal enemy with one hand, and getting together secretly to share information with them in a spirit of trust and honesty with the other. There was too much mistrust, and it just wasn't ever going to work.

"Given what was at stake, the intelligence services of the post war great powers agreed that a permanent solution to the problem was required, if the world wasn't going to be accidentally destroyed by one side retaliating for something the other hadn't done. At the time, Vienna in Austria was the espionage playground of the world, so Austria was the obvious country to host the conference, and they convened in the small town of Wolsberg. Initially, it was the foreign intelligence services of the big players, so the CIA, MI6, the DGSE, and the MGB. They agreed that the domestic intelligence services should also be involved - so the FBI, MI5, the MVD, the RG and the DST were also invited to attend, and also representatives of the relevant governments. Everybody present agreed that certain individuals and organisations were a global problem, and needed a global solution. So they drafted an agreement, a concordat, which established a list of people and organisations that were to be dealt with pan-nationally by a new organisation formed specially to deal with the threat. This list was called 'the Y-list'. I've no idea why."

Wade cleared his throat loudly at this point, interrupting. "Actually, 'Department Y' in Stalin's pre-world-war-II NKVD intelligence agency was responsible for dealing with what they called super-criminals. The Russians suggested calling it the 'Y list' for that reason."

Dr Director paused and looked somewhat grumpily at Wade on the big screen. "I might have known that you'd know the answer, Mr Load." Wade blinked, but was otherwise apparently unmoved. Dr Director turned back to Kim. "Anyway, they also decided that the organisation would be called 'The permanent committee for the implementation of the Wolsberg Concordat'. That lasted about 6 months, and then we were renamed 'Global Justice'. We were to be a completely independent organisation, with no national or agency affiliations. We would have sole global jurisdiction over Y-list entities, and no jurisdiction outside the Y-list.

"Today, as always, Global Justice shares all its intelligence and analysis on Y-list entities equally with all of the concordat's members. Members cede their jurisdiction and sovereignty to Global Justice, but in return get the benefit of our expertise and experience, and the knowledge that the Y list entities are being properly managed to their mutual benefit. One difference now, apart from the fact that the cold war has ended, is that the number of countries, intelligence agencies and law enforcement organisations who are members of the concordat has grown massively."

"I had no idea..." said Kim, her head spinning. She'd never really thought about how and why Global Justice existed. "So... who pays for all this?" she asked, waving her hand around to indicate the enormous underground complex, the hundreds of agents, and she presumed, the many other bases and thousands of other agents all over the world.

"That's the beauty of it, it funds itself!", said Dr Director, proudly. "When it was first set up, Global Justice was a small organisation paid for by the taxpayers of the great powers directly. But one of the clauses of the concordat referred to who would benefit from technology seized by Global Justice on sovereign soil. It was agreed that it would be the country the technology was found in. But if the technology was found in international waters, nobody could agree who got to exploit it. So in the end they decided that Global Justice should have it.

"And then nobody thought any more about it. Until a mad scientist tried to launch an EMP weapon from a submarine in the 1960's. And then we didn't need external funding any more. And since Professor Dementor started a trend for deep sea lairs full of lucrative technology in the middle of the world's oceans, we've had something of an embarrassment of riches, and Global Justice is a much, much larger organisation."

"So why aren't all these.. entities... locked up in jails by now?" asked Kim, somewhat confused at the image of almost invincible scale that Dr Director was projecting.

"Oh, believe me, many are. We monitor study and analyse every Y-list entity in great detail, using every one of the many tools at our disposal. And then for each we devise a plan of action that is designed to further the collective common interests of all the members of the concordat. Then we do a full risk analysis of every alternative course of action. Of the 93% of Y-list entities who we define as an active threat, 62% are incarcerated in jails around the world. In a very small number of cases, more... robust... action has been required. Global Justice maintains a paramilitary capability to cope with imminent threats to humanity or the concordat from a Y-list entity or entities. In the remaining cases, our risk analysis says that the risks of direct action outweigh the rewards. Shego has always fallen into that category."

"And by robust, you mean...killing? Like you would want to kill Shego if she was alive? But why?" asked Kim, shocked but also more confused than ever.

Dr Director sat back in her chair and put her hands behind her head. "How much do you know about Shego, Kim?"

Kim consciously decided to ignore the uncomfortable reality that her nemesis was probably dead. "Uh... ex hero with Team Go, superpowers from being hit by a comet, best Wing Chung I've ever gone toe to toe with, turned evil, now tries to take over the world?" said Kim, mentally suppressing the strange urge to add 'great body, eyes that look straight through you' to the list.

Dr Director pursed her lips for a moment and then said "No!". "

No?" queried Kim, surprised.

"No, Shego wasn't evil. That's what made her so dangerous. And she wasn't trying to take over the world, either."

"Not evil? I would have noticed! Dr Drakken would have noticed! And she does so keep trying to take over the world! Remember, I keep having to stop her!" said Kim, pointedly using present tense.

"Kim, trust me. We have a very large and competent analysis department, and some very eminent psychologists on the staff, and they do nothing all day but study and write reports on the activities, personalities and psychology of people on the Y-list. Shego was not evil, by most measures. And if Shego ever had decided to take over the world... well, I don't want to think about what might have happened. At that moment they were both simultaneously treated to the same fleeting mental image of an older Shego, white streak in her hair, standing astride the world and laughing maniacally.

Kim shrugged it off, while Dr Director shuddered momentarily.

"Shego had serious anger management issues, and a self-esteem problem. Both may well have been directly connected to her familial relationships, if you believe our analysts. The short version is that spending a day with Hego could easily be pretty unpleasant, but spending ten years growing up with him belittling your every achievement and criticising your every move, well, it made Shego the woman she was. Angry and in need of a feeling of accomplishment in her own right."

"Hego said that she fought evil so much she started to like it..." commented Kim.

"Hego never stops talking, and most of what he says is rubbish. Global Justice was evaluating Shego just before she left Team Go as a possible agent, but we decided not to pursue the option because of her anger issues. She left Team Go to save her sanity. She left the hero business a little later. Working alone, she invariably blew her stack with somebody when she was trying to put right some wrong or other, and 'shot from the hip' a lot. The end result wasn't always good, or as she would have intended. She started to feel like a failure and the harder she tried, the angrier she was and the worse it got. Eventually the cycle of failure, anger and self-loathing got too much for her, and we think that she subconsciously decided that if she wasn't going to be able to feel good about being a hero, she'd try being a villain.

"She found it suited her temperament better, and gave her back her self-esteem. She has an acquired contempt for the law and those who enforce it, but she was never evil, in any objective sense. The first guy she did a fair bit of work for, she was his private pilot, bodyguard and did a little specialised burglary for him on the side. Until she found out that he made his money trafficking young girls from the third world to brothels and pimps in the first world. Then the very next day the guy decided to retire.

"We later ascertained from his PA who was also on the plane that Shego had hung the guy upside down out of the doorway of his own jet at 10,000 feet and told him he could retire the easy way or the hard way. Then she stole a few million dollars from him and donated it to charities working with victims of people trafficking.

"Wow..." said Kim, eyes round with surprise. "That doesn't... sound... evil. But it doesn't sound good either. You can't go hanging people out of aeroplanes just because they have done bad things."

"Or, indeed, to pick a random example, go around kicking people into high-voltage communications towers just because they've managed to push your buttons on a bad day?" asked Dr Director, reproachfully.

"You... know about that?" Kim asked, her eyes wide with shock and her voice an octave above its normal register.

Betty Director held up a manila folder. "After action report." she said, by way of confirmation.

"And I won't hold it against you. It's the first time you have ever lost your self-control in a fight, according to our analysts, and they also suggest that you will have been feeling extremely guilty that it happened at all. They also say that now that you know that it can happen they expect you to take steps to make sure it will never happen again.

"I haven't even begun to get my head around what I d.. what happened" said Kim, unhappily. She was conscious and slightly disturbed that Dr Director's analysts seemed to know more about how she was going to deal with her loss of control than she did.

"I only mentioned it because it may have given you an opportunity to understand Shego a little better. Almost everything made her angry. And when she got angry, her judgement suffered. She did many things in anger that we believe she bitterly regretted. And it's that anger that makes Shego so dangerous. Attempting to neutralise her would have carried a high risk of failure, and of serious collateral damage. As we have seen. However, the real risk we faced was that Shego was potentially very easy to manipulate, if you were intent on real evil. If you could lie to Shego, and fill her with righteous anger at your enemies, then you would have a fearsome weapon at your disposal. Imagine what terrorists could have done with that weapon. Which is why Shego is identified as a particular threat on the Y-list, and why we manipulated events to ensure that when Drew Lipsky was looking for an enforcer, he got to meet her."

Kim gasped. "You put Shego together with Dr Drakken? Why?"

"Because they are a moderating influence on each other. Shego gets to implement Dr Drakken's insanely unworkable plans for world domination, thus giving her that sense of accomplishment she is looking for, while also being unavailable to work for somebody with a less transparent agenda. In turn, we hoped that Shego would moderate and... well, quality control... some of Dr Drakken's less well considered plans, to prevent any unintentional catastrophes. It mostly worked - Drakken's most recent plan got away from Shego, but generally she kept him from accidentally causing the extinction of humanity. "

"You mean... but I've nearly died foiling some of Drakken's plans to take over the world, and... but... I mean..." stammered Kim, almost speechless.

"Yes, you have unwittingly proved to be a vital component in our strategy for managing Shego and Dr Drakken. Without your involvement, we would have been forced to intervene directly to foil Drakken's plans. The risk of failure or of antagonising Shego into retaliation would have made that an unwelcome development".

"So it's been alright for me to antagonise Shego for the last year and some, while you watched from a safe distance, then?" asked Kim, her voice matching her expression in betraying distinct irritation.

"Actually, yes Kim. Our analysts have determined that Shego has... err... respect for you which she wouldn't have for, say, a Global Justice assault team. We estimated that there was an 11% chance that Shego would have declared a personal war on Global Justice in retaliation for any occasion where we were forced to get directly involved to foil one of Drakken's plans. By contrast, when you saved the world, we estimated that there was a 0.0037% chance that Shego would declare a personal war on you."

"Respect?" asked Kim, sceptically. Dr Director looked a little uncomfortable at this point, Kim noticed, but she couldn't work out why. "Yes, we believe that Shego regarded you as her equal, a worthy opponent, win, lose or draw. It was a little more complicated than that, but that was the gist of it."

Kim decided to leave the topic of 'respect' there for now and ask Wade for a copy of Global Justice's analysts' reports on Shego later, if and when she remembered. "OK, but I still don't understand. Why would you try to kill Shego now if she is still alive?"

"Because after all of our careful management, the CIA have succeeded in doing exactly what we have been trying to prevent a lunatic, a rogue state or a terrorist organisation from doing. They have primed Shego with a great deal of righteous anger against an organisation; in this case, themselves. And if Shego is still alive, then the fact that she hasn't already retaliated is an even greater cause for concern," said Dr Director.

"Why?" queried Kim.

"Shego's psychological profile. When she gets angry, her judgement is compromised. The angrier she gets, the less she thinks and the more she acts. But there's a tipping point, like a mental switch flipping, where her anger turns to pure distilled rage, and at that point she becomes utterly cold, calculating and ruthlessly rational in her course of action. And since Langley isn't already in flames, we can deduce that Shego is either dead, incapacitated, or she's gone past that tipping point and is holed up somewhere rigorously planning a terrible revenge against those who she holds responsible for what happened to her. I don't think she could have wiped out the CIA, let alone defeated the military might of the world's most powerful nation. But she could easily have caused great damage to the CIA, its infrastructure and its command structure. And if Langley burns, so does the concordat. And in due course, so does the world. So we would have to stop her."

"And your only option is to kill her?" asked Kim, eyes blazing.

"Regrettably, yes. We would need to stop her, and from our pre-canned what-if scenarios, I recall that an assassination operation would have a 65% chance of success, all be it with high risk of collateral damage. The next best scenario would only have a 25% chance of success, and then we are down in single figures," explained Dr Director.

"65%... and if it doesn't work? What is it that has a 25% chance of success?", asked Kim.

"Then we would try again, and again, until we did succeed. Once we had made an attempt to kill Shego, there would be no way back. It would be her or us. Really, we'd need to make very sure that we got her the first time, otherwise it would necessarily get... extremely messy..." "And that second option? The one with the 25% chance of success?", asked Kim again. "Ah... actually, that's you." said Dr Director, again looking almost imperceptibly uncomfortable.

"Me?" asked Kim, incredulously.

"Umm... we believe that you would have a 25% chance of talking Shego down from doing something extreme and suicidal," said Dr Director. Kim just stared, wide eyed.

"As I said earlier, she... respects you. It's a long shot, but the analysts believe there is a good chance that she would at least hear you out, which makes you pretty much unique," explained the one-eyed woman.

"I find that very hard to believe" said Kim, "but I do have one more question. Why did the Uzbeks want Shego?"

"Believe me, you really do not want to know, Kim." said Dr Director, and Kim got the feeling that she was sincere.

"Sorry, but I do. You know I can always ask Wade..." said Kim, firmly. But she was shocked by the reaction of the normally relatively brusque head of Global Justice.

"Kim, no, you mustn't, you just can't inflict that on anybody at ten years old", said Betty Director, sharply, emotion raw in her voice. Then, as quickly as the mask had slipped, she was back under control. "No offence intended, Mr Load, but I would feel very uncomfortable if I'd asked you for information about this, and so should Kim." Wade merely blinked, impassively.

"Well tell me something, at least!" said Kim, wondering if she really did want to know.

"I'll tell you this much. A little over a year ago, Shego was in Uzbekistan stealing for Dr Drakken. There was... an atrocity. A massacre," explained Dr Director.

"Shego?" asked Kim, afraid of what the answer might be.

"No, Uzbek security forces, but Shego just happened to be passing as it was happening. And she reacted as we would have predicted, emotionally and violently. Let us just say that the final outcome was poor for all concerned, and the Uzbeks have been after her ever since. In fact, they later sent an SNB hit team after her, and although we intercepted them, that led directly to Uzbekistan's expulsion from the concordat", said Dr Director. "And trust me, you really don't want to know any more."

Kim decided she believed her.

oOo

Mike Jones had a terrible sinking feeling; the feeling that his careful and considered career choice was coming drastically unravelled around him and was instead going to haunt him for the rest of his days. Up until right now it had seemed like he'd made exactly the right move. At the annual university 'public service' career fair, they'd all been there, trying to woo him. He'd been much in demand. Anybody with a brace of Cambridge Firsts in Astrophysics and in Political Philosophy perhaps would be, especially if they were also fluent in Arabic, Farsi, Spanish and French. So it had been something of a beauty contest.

GCHQ were very keen to secure his services. They wanted to make him a junior on the Middle East desk, translating intercepts. In time - maybe ten years -there might have been an opportunity to move up to be an analyst, actually interpreting intelligence, using his scientific knowledge to provide crucial insight into the state of development and capability of a foreign power's next top secret weapon system. But by then he would probably have topped himself out of boredom.

MI6 wanted to train him as a field officer and then post him to an embassy in some Middle East hotspot as a 'Junior Trade Attache', so he could set up and run a network of agents in local businesses and government offices. Far more challenging and exciting in some ways, but far less intellectually stimulating. And anyway, he wanted to be a scientist, not James Bond.

MI5 had only wanted to speak to classics graduates, which had pretty much confirmed everything he had ever heard about them.

And then there had been the little stand in the corner of the hall, with 'Global Justice' written on it. And they'd promised him the opportunity to work in one of the best equipped laboratories in the world, solving complex scientific conundrums one day, and developing new weapons and forensic techniques the next. The salary and benefits package was pretty stellar as well. And they'd promised to sponsor his Phd research.

Sold.

He'd been on a plane across the Atlantic within the month. And here he was now, two days into his new life, standing in a fifty-three million dollar underground laboratory (complete with its own particle accelerator), and being asked quite the stupidest question anybody had ever asked him. GCHQ looked quite attractive in hindsight.

He turned and looked despairingly at the senior Global Justice scientist who had been assigned to help him get his feet under the table. "What the hell do they want me to do with that?" he asked.

"Investigate it, mate" said Dr Callum "Digger" Hawk, drily.

"You are kidding, aren't you?" he said, pointing expressively at the plasma screen which was repeatedly showing the 10 second segment of the executive jet exploding in a fireball on a loop.

"No, actually, mate" admonished the Australian thermodynamicist, "and believe me, there is no such thing as an obvious answer when you're talking about the Y-list. That's Shego. Case in point. 18 months ago her boss screwed up a research project, accidentally blew up his lair, and dropped a whole mountain on their heads. She managed to survive the unsurviveable, keep her boss alive, and bore her way out through 200,000 tonnes of solid rock. Less than 24 hours before that video clip was taken, she was the human earthing spike for a close to 2 Megawatt discharge. So just because she was flying a plane that was blown to kingdom come ten thousand feet up in the air, I'd certainly not be quick to declare her dead without positive proof!"

"So you think they really believe that she could have survived that?" asked Mike, incredulously?

"I'd say so, mate. And even if they don't, they know they can't afford to be wrong," commented 'Digger'.

"OK, so how do you recommend I go about scientifically proving that she's dead?" asked Mike.

"Wrong way round, mate! Assume that she survived, then work out how the hell she could have done it. Because odds are, if there was a way out, she would have found it, and if there wasn't she would have died trying to find one anyway. If nothing else you might be able to work out where they should be looking for the body," said 'Digger'.

Mike sighed. "OK, I think I'll start with the CVR tape, and those photos of the wreckage they've lifted so far. Where did we get this stuff?"

"Straight from the CIA, mate. Only, they don't know we've got it..." said 'Digger'.

"Oh, that's a bit cheeky. Hmmm..." said Mike, as he turned his mind to the task at hand. "OK, why don't I rig up a digital filter matrix to clean up this cockpit audio and then run it through a spectrum analyser. Maybe that will tell us something more..."

"Sounds like a plan, mate! Give me a shout if you need any help!" responded 'Digger'.

"Oh, yeah, thanks..."said Mike, vacantly, his mind on the job already. Perhaps this was going to be an interesting investigation after all, he decided...


	8. In the dark of the night

It was very dark, and very quiet in the bathroom attached to Kim's bedroom. Quiet, that is apart from the sound of muffled sobbing. Wracking, gasping sobs. Sobs that were stifled only by a stuffed Pandaroo, which Kim was hanging on to for grim death. Her watch told her it was 3 AM, and the tiled floor was cold under her bare feet and backside, but she daren't move away from the lavatory too far in case... those... images flashed through her head again. And then she would surely be violently sick again. Or more likely, dry heave - there was nothing left to bring up. There was no way she could sleep at the moment. Even closing her eyes was terrifying. And she had to be back at GJ first thing in the morning for that postponed briefing. She really had believed that she didn't want to know more about why Shego was wanted by the Uzbeks. She really had believed that Betty Director had been sincere. Now she knew why.

oOo

Kim made her way up the stairs, fully intending to get her head down for an early night. Telling the Dr's Possible over dinner that she would be away on a mission for a couple of weeks hadn't really been the problem she had imagined it might be, once Dad had been reassured that her summer assignments would all still be done before the start of the new school year. Indeed, Mrs Dr Possible had seemed happy that Kim would be keeping busy, with Ron being unexpectedly away. She suspected that had she suggested the two week hiking holiday with Ron that she had tentatively been dreaming about organising, before Ron had been whisked away from her, the reaction might have been somewhat less positive. At least from Dad. She had long ago given up trying to fathom the thought process that allowed Mr Dr Possible to treat her regular dices with death with almost total equanimity, yet completely blow a fuse when confronted by the reality that she might be dating; some things just defied rational analysis. One unexpected benefit of her briefing being postponed until the next morning was that she'd been able to tell them as much as she knew about what she would be doing. Which was precious little, truth be told. Usually, whenever Global Justice had worked with her in the past they had imposed ridiculously melodramatic secrecy requirements, in return for offering her use of their resources, and she had a couple of times been in the most uncomfortable position of having to walk a fine line between lying to her parents, if only by omission, and breaking her agreement with Global Justice. Still, for some reason she hadn't told them about what had happened to Shego. She didn't know why.

Just as soon as she had closed her bedroom door behind her, the Kimunicator chirped. "What's the sitch, Wade?", she asked.

"Kim, I've pulled a lot of data together on what Shego was doing in Uzbekistan. I've got a copy of the Global Justice after action report, some pictures and I've managed to get hold of video from both Global Justice and from Uzbekistan. Should I send it to you or would you like me to analyse it and just give you the headlines?" asked Wade.

"Wade, don't even look at it. Any of it," Kim said, quickly. Wade just blinked, enigmatically. Had he already looked, Kim wondered? Perhaps it wasn't so bad after all!

Then she made a fateful decision. She could do anything. So of course she would be able to cope with whatever Wade might send her. "Wade, download all of it to the Kimmunicator, and then delete your copy, OK?"

"Err..Kim...", Wade started to protest.

"Sorry, Wade, but I need you to do this", she admonished. "I so don't want you to have nightmares on my account! Please and thank-you!"

Wade frowned. A few seconds later he said "OK, transfer complete! And I've deleted my copies."

"You rock, Wade!", she asserted. Then she cut the link, swapped her Club Banana street clothes for a comfortable sleep shirt, climbed into bed and settled down to read the after-action report on the Kimmunicator's screen.

The dry language of the report failed to capture the true horror of what had happened in and to the small town of Tarqand, although it described the events visible from a satellite overhead in excruciating detail. It also referred ominously to the events that had occurred inside the Interior Ministry building, but only in passing and by reference to the garbled second hand accounts of a couple of survivors from the town who had escaped into the surrounding hills after the Uzbek security forces had brutally 're-established control'. They had almost wiped out the town's population in the process, using overwhelming and brutal force, up to and including air strikes, against any dissent or resistance, past or ongoing. The consequences for the inhabitants of Tarqand had been catastrophic, with the majority of the population killed, and most of the survivors swept up and herded en masse into a slave labour camp at gunpoint. The town itself was substantially destroyed, while the police, the interior ministry and the SNB had all suffered mass casualties and enormous infrastructure damage at the hands of the enraged Shego.

All of this was clear from the text she was reading, some of it open mouthed, some of it her lip bitten. But in the coldly dispassionate prose of the professionally written reportage of events that comprises an after action report, it was quite obvious why Shego had done what she had done, quite obvious that her motives were indubitably far from evil, and quite obvious also that she hadn't thought through the consequences or considered her actions carefully at all, to the detriment of those she had tried to help. And evil or not, she had definitely killed a great many people, some very violently. But all that was easy to say, reading the report in the safe and comfortable surroundings of her own bedroom. It described a whole series of horrific events, but in a way that diluted their impact. And that diluted impact lulled her into a false sense of security.

She opened the first video, which it became clear originated from the global justice satellite that had been tracking Shego's jet through Uzbek airspace. It was a bit hard to pick out detail on the screen of the Kimmunicator, so she set it down on her bedside table and switched it to projector mode; the images were displayed in much larger form on the white painted door of her bedroom closet. She found that rather than watching video footage, she was actually watching a series of extraordinarily high resolution still images, taken from space approximately ten seconds apart, and then assembled into a stop-motion film that approximated to real time.

The sheer weirdness of the video gave the events it depicted a spurious air of unreality. The first few snapshots in the sequence were of Shegos' jet over different pieces of Uzbek terrain, and then suddenly the next snapshot showed the plane against the backdrop of a small town, and Kim had ten seconds to look at tiny bodies and even smaller pools of blood on the ground beneath the plane, with little people in uniform standing amongst them. And then events unfolded, just as the after action report had described. The snapshots made it all the more vivid, of course, but there were no real surprises. Some of the individual vignettes were memorable. In one frame, red streaks that could only be from tracer rounds were converging on a tumbling Shego, captured in mid gyration, from various directions.

In the very next tablaux, captured ten seconds later, there were hardly any red streaks in the frame, but a number of the vehicles from behind which the police had been firing at Shego were ablaze, surrounded by more diminutive bodies.

Although the disjointed and silent images of Shego carving her way, sometimes literally, through the police of Tarqand were powerful and sometimes disturbing, the small scale and the perspective from directly overhead, combined with the flashcard style, did dim their impact somewhat. The fractured mute images of events after she left the town, the shooting down of the laden helicopter gunships, Shego's desperate and repeated strafing of the column of interior ministry troops, the burning vehicles, the death and destruction, then the start of the assault on the town and its population, were more poignant than horrific.

Thinking about the reality the images depicted was harder. The pictures themselves had an almost video-game quality about them. Especially the way that, as Shego was forced to make a break for it, the satellite's cameras followed her and the fate of the town was sealed without witnesses. Nevertheless, Kim found an involuntary tear springing from the corner of her eye, and she realised that she had bitten her lip a few times. Still, she concluded, she would be able to cope with having watched this.

Then she turned to what it transpired was a group of videos, which were accompanied by a hypertext document containing a floor plan with camera locations marked, a brief description in American English of the layout of the Tarqand interior ministry building's basement, and the timeline of each video clip. These hadn't come from Global Justice. Indeed, judging by the after action report, Global Justice had never seen them. These looked like they had been lifted straight from an archive in Uzbekistan. Those marked camera locations also doubled as hyperlinks to the raw video from those same cameras. There was also another link to a compilation video which the document explained was the significant action from the 11 cameras edited together to make a single film, a film which started at the point in time that Shego first overflew the town, and ended at the point she was forced to escape. She was quite blasé about watching this video. How bad could it possibly be?

Worse than she ever could have imagined in her wildest nightmares, if only she had known.

The first thing she noticed when she played the compilation film was the better-than broadcast quality video and the hi-fidelity sound (in her headphones, which she was using to save keeping anybody else in the house awake).

At first Kim thought that somebody must have over specified the security cameras hugely. It was only later, when she was huddled in the bathroom, that she realised the chilling truth - that somebody had wanted to be able to enjoy what was happening in that basement, and possibly in others like it, without having to physically be there.

Somewhere in the Uzbek hierarchy, there was somebody being entertained by what was happening in front of those cameras. It was a realisation awful enough to make anybody retch. There were other things that Kim at first misinterpreted. For example, she was immediately puzzled by what appeared to be a slaughter-man carefully skinning a side of beef hanging on a meat hook.

It was only as the carcass was turned that Kim suddenly realised that it wasn't a side of beef being skinned, it was a human being.

Kim's head span, and her stomach heaved, but she stared in awful, horrified fascination. And then what she had assumed was a corpse opened its eyes, started writhing and screamed at the top of its lungs in mortal agony.

Kim had realised that she was watching a woman being skinned alive.

She was fortunate that there was a metal trash can beside her bed. The horrifying blood-curdling screams continued to bounce around inside her skull, and they so paralysed her mind that she couldn't pull together sufficient faculties to even rip the headphones from her head. Each new scream caused another involuntary contraction of Kim's stomach, as a momentary sideways glance at the closet door showed the delighted looking perpetrator of this inhuman cruelty throwing handfuls of salt at the blood-soaked flesh and muscle of his excorticated victim.

Finally, Kim was able to muster the motor control to hit the pause button on the Kimunicator. By now, the waste basket already contained her last two meals and half her stomach lining, and her face was streaked with tears. She hadn't even realised that she was crying. But the moment she stopped the video, she realised that she felt compelled to watch it to the end. Even if it killed her; which she considered that it just might. The after action report had said nothing about this. It had referred to 'unreliable first and second hand reports from excitable local witnesses' and 'some evidence of overly robust interrogation protocols in operation'. This was... this was...

She steeled herself, and resumed the playback. The film cycled around the other cameras, as the torturer continued peeling the skin from the screaming woman. The architecture, in this vaulted basement, was very gothic, almost stereotypical for a dungeon. A few of the cameras showed corridors, empty apart from bored looking guards, the others were in the cells.

One cell appeared to be a holding cell - there were 20 or so people in there, Kim estimated, all chained to the wall at height by their wrists. A few of the inhabitants were hanging by their manacles; some looked like they had already been horribly abused.

The other cells were clearly for the purpose of inflicting pain. In one, an apparently unconscious man was dangling from his manacled wrists, ankle deep in a vat of water; boiling water. The winch capstan set up to raise and lower him was a chilling clue to the fate that was planned to befall him; being boiled alive an inch at a time, in this case.

Kim was again horrified, but still transfixed.

Each of the remaining cells contained some piece of almost cartoon-like medieval torture equipment - a rack in one, a furnace and a collection of pokers in another, and an ominous electrical installation in another, which Kim surmised was designed for applying shocks to sensitive body parts. In each of them was also a victim, either manacled to the wall awaiting his or her fate, or attached to some fiendish engine of abuse. Most were unconscious, some were sobbing, others gibbering incoherently, sent insane by the ceaseless torture they had been subject to.

In the cell with the red hot pokers there were two people, a man and a woman, both apparently unconscious, both naked and both covered in hideous burns. Obviously part of the torture for each of them was watching the other suffer. But where were all the torturers, wondered the part of Kim's mind that hadn't gone tilt in response to graphic horrors unfolding on the door of her bedroom closet?

There was another, longer louder, more blood-curdling scream from the woman being skinned alive, and the camera viewpoint switched back to her jerking, twitching body. It wasn't clear what the smirking man in the slaughter-man's apron and the chain-mail glove had just done to her, but it had clearly been particularly painful. Oh how Kim wished Shego would arrive and wipe that smirk off the man's face. In fact, she found herself wishing for Shego to do rather more. Kim was suddenly aware that she was watching genuine premeditated evil in action. Not the kind of deranged and dangerous idiocy perpetrated by the likes of Professor Dementor or D N Amy, but the real, hideous, unspeakable thing. Shego's regular assertions that she was in fact evil herself would never have been even slightly convincing again, if she had still been alive that is.

The screaming abruptly stopped. The woman had apparently lapsed back into unconsciousness. The smirking torturer placed his blood-stained tools back on their hooks, then hung up the chain mail gloves and the blood soaked apron and walked away, whistling cheerfully. Kim found herself hating him viscerally, desperate for Shego to arrive and to stop this.

The compiler of the video obviously had delusions of directorial grandeur, as the camera viewpoint was repeatedly changed, tracking the relaxed stroll of the cheerfully whistling torturer along one corridor and then another, until he passed through a set of double swing doors.

It was only a few seconds later, when the swing doors stopped moving that the budding Spielberg showed Kim what was happening behind them. There were armchairs, and carpet, and a coffee jug. The whistling butcher was pouring a coffee, and around the room a number of other men and women were lounging, drinking beverages, reading magazines and eating snacks. On one wall hung a giant plasma TV screen, which was currently tuned to International Musicvision, the 24 hour satellite music channel. A legend on the screen proclaimed 'Oh Boyz Afternoon' and indeed, the light and frothy lyrics of 'Hello, Hello, Hello' could be heard in the background, as the band members danced enthusiastically on the screen. The Oh Boyz; music to boil people to.

Just as the whistling knife-artist was heading for a chair, one of his colleagues pointed out, in Uzbek, that he had blood on his face. Kim knew this because somebody had helpfully added English subtitles to this compilation of Uzbek security camera footage.

The two torturers were just sharing a joke about the blood spatter when there was an announcement made over loudspeakers.

Again, there were subtitles.

"Attention! Attention! There is an insurrection in the town. The police station is under attack. All security personnel stand to. Staff should not leave the building until further notice."

"Ah! Excellent! Overtime!" exclaimed a man sitting in an armchair reading the paper. The rest of the torturers laughed out loud.

Kim realised that by now, Shego was indeed in the adjacent police station. This basement was designed to be completely soundproof, so that the screams of the victims didn't disturb the other occupants of the building. But that worked both ways. As far as Kim was concerned, Shego couldn't get there quickly enough.

A couple of the torturers started a discussion about the poor condition of the rack, and the Oh Boyz were crooning "You know that I gotta stay, It's not that I love you, baby" behind them. Then another found great amusement in the way the man currently being slowly boiled alive had cried and pleaded for almost an entire day as he held himself above the water, before his strength had finally given out and his feet had fallen into the boiling liquid. Kim felt sick again. And angry. Then klaxons sounded, and Kim noticed the first flicker of fear on the face of one of the torturers, and Kim knew that Shego was in the Interior Ministry building. The monster who had found amusement in the fear and humiliation of the poor man being boiled alive went to the wall mounted phone and had a short and inaudible conversation with somebody, and as he spoke, his face went white. When he put the phone down he looked terrified, and said to everybody in the room "There's something inhuman coming!"

Kim found that bitterly ironic.

The viewpoint switched to the camera covering the entrance. A panicky looking interior ministry guard stood with his back to the steel plate door, an AKM now in his hands as he scanned the torture chamber, as if expecting an escape attempt. Thus he never saw the area around the heavy duty mortise lock glow first red and then white behind him. The first, and last he knew of Shego's arrival was when the door flew open with great force and struck him in the back, knocking him flying. He landed in an unconscious heap, his rifle skittering away to the far side of the chamber.

Shego entered at a crouch. Through the door, the camera showed at least two prone Interior Ministry guards, obviously stationed outside the door of this vile dungeon, and who Shego had encouraged to have a little lie down on the job. Part of Kim had been waiting for Shego to arrive, not knowing what she would do exactly (or had done, Kim had to later remind herself), but subconsciously hoping that she might do something that would adequately reflect the enormity of the torturers' crimes against humanity. Hoping, Kim later realised, that Shego would do something that she could never even contemplate doing herself; because she was Kim Possible, teen hero. Did that make her a hypocrite; a moral coward?

What actually happened took Kim by surprise. As Shego stepped inside the door, hands flaring green, she was clearly looking for threats. It was a couple of seconds before she did a very obviously shocked double take, and became rooted to the spot, staring through the open cell door in front of her at the bloody, part-skinned woman, who was gruesomely twisting lazily on her hook. She was clearly transfixed, slack jawed, eyes moist, horrified by what she was looking at. Kim felt a degree of real empathy with Shego at that moment. She'd only ever seen Shego telegraph such raw emotions once before, and that was when she had been equally screwed up by those moodulator gizmos.

A good twenty seconds passed with Shego standing statuesque, staring. It seemed longer. With each passing second, Kim realised, the green glow around her hands was getting brighter.

And brighter.

And brighter.

Kim wondered for a second whether she might explode, until she remembered that this was something that had already happened.

Twenty-five seconds after Shego had entered the interior ministry dungeon, the plasma around Shego's hands was glowing so brightly that it illuminated that part of the basement with a brilliant green glow that the camera struggled to cope with, and there were fizzes and pops as little balls of plasma flew off her hands and exploded against the walls and floor. And then the guard from the main corridor walked round the corner into the entrance hall to see where the weird green light was coming from, and seeing Shego, started to pull the butt of his rifle up towards his shoulder.

It never made it there.

His arrival seemed to break Shego's reverie, and she exploded into action. She fired two bolts of plasma at the hapless guard, and gave forth an enraged bellow that left her state of mind in no doubt. The guard was there, and then there was a loud 'crack' and he wasn't.

Kim had never seen anybody vanish when hit by Shego's plasma before. Apparently the apprentice Spielberg was also surprised, as the video went back and repeated the sequence for a second time, but in slow motion with varying camera angles. Kim was amazed to see the two bolts of plasma hit the guard, a tenth of a second apart. The first went straight through the man's torso, leaving a clean cauterised hole almost a foot in diameter. It would obviously be fatal. The second bolt was more diffuse, bigger, and it hit the man and carried him away with it. This partially explained him vanishing. A second viewpoint showed the first plasma bolt hitting the stone wall at the end of the long corridor and exploding violently. A moment later, the second arrived, and imprinted the carbonised remnants of the guard on what was left of the stonework with a bang. Globules of molten metal from his rifle were splattered all across the wall, and running down towards the floor.

Kim was amazed. She'd been caught by a couple of Shego's plasma blasts in her time. They had hurt and thrown her across a couple of rooms, but... seeing what Shego could have done to her but never had was as sobering as it was astounding. She could also see why Global Justice had decided that antagonising Shego was wholly counterproductive.

Once the spell had been broken by the arrival and rapid departure of the guard, Kim watched Shego instantly turn into an angel of apocalyptic vengeance.

Later, Kim realised that there were at least four distinct aspects of what happened on her closet door during the next two and a half minutes of the video, and since she re-watched the segment between her dealing with the first guard and smashing through the barricaded doors of the recreation room at least ten times, she had had plenty of opportunities to understand them all.

If she ignored the brutal reality of the extreme violence that peppered those 150 seconds of action, Kim could look at it as balletic, graceful, fluid, and beautiful. The way Shego moved through the dungeon, Kim imagined that you could set it to music; Kim could almost see Shego cartwheeling through the vaulted basement to the strains of the Blue Danube Waltz, sheer poetry in non-stop motion.

Then again, it really was brutal. One interior ministry guard took cover behind a stone column and then reached around it with his AK-M to wildly spray bullets in Shego's general direction. Shego, mid somersault, merely fired a blast of plasma straight through the pillar and the guard, bringing about a ton of masonry down on top of his smoking corpse. Another guard ducked into a cell after his weapon jammed, and Shego followed him in and cracked him around the head with a typically beautifully executed Juen So Tek (spinning heel kick) so brutally efficient that Kim heard the sickening crunch of his jaw shattering in her headphones. Shego then followed it up as part of the same fluid movement with a simple but very powerful Juk Tek (side kick), which caught the unconscious guard before he could hit the ground, and sent him flying across the cell where he slammed into the main power distribution panel, becoming impaled on the electrodes normally used to power the implements of torture. There was a lot of twitching and some smoke, which Shego ignored, and Kim tried to.

The third somewhat incongruous facet of Shego's whirlwind assault on the dungeon could be seen in the way that she tenderly and compassionately dealt with victims of the horrors of the dungeon. This particular cell's inhabitant was a case in point. Kim was particularly surprised by the gentle, soothing tone of voice that Shego used to the man who she found chained to an earthed metal grating against the wall, as she freed him. And she did it in Russian. Rather shaky Russian, admittedly, but neither (the gentle tone nor the linguistics) were things Kim had ever imagined were in Shego. But the fourth impression of Shego's knife-through-butter assault, especially from the perspective of somebody who saw themselves as a potential target of Shego's wrath, could only be that it was utterly terrifying. Watching her plough with the greatest of ease through the fabric and defenders of the basement, coupled with the earlier imagery of her laying waste to the police and SNB men of Tarqand could do nothing but evoke naked fear in those who might feel that they had got onto the wrong side of Shego. If the CIA could watch the same footage that Kim was watching, they would surely not be remotely comfortable, to say the least, until they had gathered the proof that she really was dead.

Once Shego reached the double doors, the director - more Tarantino than Spielberg, Kim decided - switched to a camera viewpoint inside the room, where the terrified torturers had piled all their nice comfortable soft furnishings up against the doors in a makeshift barricade. All bar one of the occupants were cowering at the far end of the basement room. One clutched a chair leg as a makeshift weapon; another was apparently armed with a stiletto. The remaining torturer was near the door, frantically trying to raise somebody, anybody, upstairs on the wall-mounted telephone. From his increasingly panic-stricken expression, and repeated dialling, it was clear that there was no answer from any internal number at all.

And then the double doors exploded, and when the smoke slowly cleared, there was nothing left of either the doors or the barricade but smoking matchwood, through which Shego strolled. The man who had been on the phone was moaning, impaled by numerous large wooden splinters, and in due course he collapsed to the floor in a growing puddle of his own blood. Somebody had earlier muted the sound on the plasma TV, so that the Oh Boyz now pranced noiselessly on the big screen, their silent but cheerful dance routine contrasting wildly with the expression of distilled hatred on Shego's face, and of terror on the faces of the erstwhile torturers.

Time seemed to stand still for a few moments. And then the man with the stiletto threw it straight at Shego's chest with unerring accuracy. Shego caught the knife directly in front of her chest, held it for a couple of seconds in her glowing hand, and then, once the whole of the steel dagger was glowing almost white hot, she threw it back, faster but equally accurately; straight into the thigh of her assailant. The man screamed in agony, as the smoke of searing human flesh rose from the wound, followed a quarter of a second later by another even louder scream as he grabbed the white hot handle of the dagger with his bare hand, and the burnt flesh stuck to the metal. The man who had hold of the chair leg dropped it at this point and started to whimper. The man with the white hot knife embedded in his thigh screamed again and writhed on the floor in agony.

Shego's hands glowed with ever increasing intensity and her expression became yet darker, and more malevolent, if that were possible. And then, just at that moment where Kim knew she was going to be forced to address the issue of whether or not she really was a hypocrite, Shego's face suddenly became calm, almost serene, and she extinguished her hands. And then she sauntered over to the nearest cowering torturer, dragged him to his feet, and drove her foot powerfully into the side of his knee. It snapped, and he fell to the ground with a strangled scream. Shego quickly moved on to the next nearest torturer...

Despite the sustained, emotionless, clinical violence that followed, Kim bizarrely found it all a bit anticlimactic. She had steeled herself for something altogether more robust, more emotionally charged. Had she subconsciously hoped for more? She really didn't know. In due course, Shego stepped back to examine her handiwork, which lay around the floor, sobbing and whimpering.

And then she spoke, in a tone of voice that would have curdled milk. "There are some people out there", she said in Russian, "who deserve the chance to show you how they feel about you."

There was a collective wail of despair from her audience as Shego turned on her heel and left the room.

Kim was quite stunned by the Machiavellian clarity of Shego's thinking. Yes, Shego definitely had done something that Kim would never have done herself. And Kim knew in her heart that it really was wrong; barbaric in fact. But for all that, it seemed so... appropriate.

Kim didn't really pay much attention to the next part of the video, as Shego moved through the dungeon again, releasing the prisoners, comforting some of them, but making sure that every one of them knew where their erstwhile tormentors could be found. In due course, a goodly number of them, some limping, others having to be helped, took up the fearsome implements that had previously been used to abuse them, and slowly began advancing on the recreation room, intent on revenge.

Tarantino's apprentice switched into split screen mode at this point, showing Shego strolling towards the exit on the left of Kim's closet door, and the shambling mass of torture victims crowding purposefully through the gaping doorway of the recreation room, holding power tools, scalpels, blow torches and iron bars on the right hand side. And then, just as Shego was strolling out of the door of the dungeon and the surging mob of vengeful humanity had surrounded the first of the whimpering torturers, Kim hit the stop button, ending the playback. Kim had a pretty good idea what must have happened next in that recreation room, and she didn't want to even think about it, let alone watch it happen.

The sudden, oppressive darkness and silence caused Kim to shudder involuntarily. She quickly flicked on the light and then busied herself in her bathroom, dealing with the contents of her bedside trash can. In due course, the metal bin was clean and empty, and Kim had gargled away the unpleasant aftertaste of her earlier gastric eruption. Kim returned to her bedroom, grateful not to have to read about or watch any more of the horrors of Tarqand. She knew that the report and the videos had given her much food for thought. And rather belatedly, given the fact that she was probably dead, potentially a much greater insight into her nemesis. She had probably learnt a few things about herself as well. Not all of them things that she had wanted to know.

But for now, she was exhausted. She climbed wearily between the sheets and turned out the light, then reached for Pandaroo.

And then she shut her eyes. And saw, in her mind's eye, what looked like a side of beef hanging on a meat hook. And then it opened its eyes and screamed...


	9. Crouching Monkey, Hidden NMR

The imposing figure of Saru Chounouryoku sat cross-legged in the bow of the sampan, as it rocked its way slowly through the teeming harbour towards the four moored junks. Only his impressive musculature moved, twitching and rippling spontaneously. That and his eyes...

Although his pose was statuesque, his eyes were swivelling anxiously from side to side, as if he were looking for something, but didn't want to be seen to look. And then, although his extraordinary anatomy continued to spontaneously ripple under his shinobi shozoko, one muscle near his waist seemed to ripple rather more than was entirely natural. That unnatural ripple took the form of a distinct bulge that moved slowly up his stomach and then across his left pectoral, until a small pink head emerged cautiously in the V at the neckline of his traditional ninja garb.

"Careful, little buddy! I sense that we are being watched from afar!", warned Saru melodramatically under his breath.

The little pink head vanished instantly, and he heard a whispered 'OK' from somewhere near his armpit.

Rufus had been able to move like a ghost past the massed ranks of the security guards and the various security scanners, before concealing himself initially inside Saru Chounouryoku's trunk after it had been scanned, only leaping athletically back into his shinobi shozoko as the luggage was being loaded into the sampan, and it would be disastrous if he were discovered now.

If he had known that the direct cause of all the hairs on the back of his neck standing up was a pair of giggling school girls fighting over who was going to stare dreamily at him through the coin operated telescope on the cliff top overlooking the harbour, he might perhaps have been slightly more relaxed. He had already come to terms with the quite disturbing effect he had on most people he met; he took the reaction of the two boatmen in charge of his sampan when he climbed aboard entirely in his stride, for example, as one grinned inanely at him with his mouth hanging open, while the other pouted angrily with simmering jealously. However, momentarily the telescope's shutter snapped closed on their last Hong Kong dollar coin, and the two school girls wistfully resumed their journey home, while the erect hairs on the nape of Saru's neck relaxed in sympathy.

He took a deep breath, as the tension relieved itself, and allowed his mind to wander. He found himself thinking about the bizarre sequence of events that had brought him to this precarious little wooden vessel, bobbing around on this vile smelling water in this giant harbour...

oOo

It was a nightmare, really. Ron had just got together...together, together... with the girl, the young woman, he had been best friends with since pre-school, the young woman he was sometimes, no often in awe of, the woman he had suppressed any and every possible 'other' kind of feeling for for so long that it had become almost as reflexive as breathing, but the young woman he had, if he was honest with himself, wondered about being closer to ever since puberty had snuck up on him. Simple curiosity? Teenage hormones? Something more significant? He didn't know. But he had always just known, instinctively, as surely as he had just known that the sky was up and the ground was down, that he wasn't good enough to have even the slightest chance with her.

Ever.

Except now he had discovered that the sky was down and the ground was up after all, and that he and Kim were... what... dating? Well, if the prom was a date, then yes.

In love? He didn't think so, unless what he had always felt for Kim actually was love.

Friends with benefits? That sounded kind of sordid.

He really had no idea what it was, or whether it was going to mess up the most significant relationship of his life to date. And now he wasn't going to have the time to even find out, let alone get used to the idea.

When Sensei had appeared to him in a dream and told him that Yamanouchi had need of him urgently for something important, he had rushed to pack and headed for the airport to catch a 6am flight to Japan without even thinking. It was the wheels coming up with a loud thump that seemed to break his trance and remind him that he was leaving Middleton and Kim behind with so much yet unsaid and undone between them. He remembered asking Sensei to tell Kim where he was going in his dream, but he hadn't even spoken to her himself yet - he didn't think she would appreciate a 5am phone call. He'd have to phone her on an airport payphone when he landed, which would make for a very short, very expensive conversation.

Having been woken in the small hours by Sensei invading his dreams, Ron needed sleep, and as soon as the seatbelt sign went out, Ron took the opportunity. And once again he dreamt about Kim. He had been dreaming about Kim when sensei had appeared to summon him. But fortunately, it had been like every other dream Ron had ever had that featured Kim. He dreamt about her saving the world. Fully clothed. It wasn't like he didn't have x-rated dreams, or anything, he reflected after he was awoken by the 'bong' of the 'Fasten Seatbelts' sign being illuminated. There probably wasn't another girl on the cheerleading team, apart from Bonnie obviously, that Ron hadn't dreamt about wrestling naked in jello with. He didn't know where that idea had come from, but he kept both the cheerleaders and the jello firmly to himself. And he had definitely fantasised liberally about Yori. One dream had her doing a highly erotic dance for him featuring her fans. And then having rough, Monkey Kung-Fu style, bouncing-off-the-walls style sex with him.

Actually, he didn't know if it was a coincidence, but it seemed like since he had been the recipient of mystical monkey power, his erotic dreams had become much more creative, and featured him doing or having done to him things that he'd never even heard of before, let alone imagined being involved in. For somebody still waiting to pop his cherry in real life, it was a little... alarming. And ever since he had first clapped eyes on her he had been periodically having the most wild dreams about Shego, which mystical monkey power seemed to have made much wilder, for some reason. In every scenario you could picture, realistic and contrived. Ron didn't ask to start dreaming about making the beast with two backs with his best friend's nemesis, and he didn't know how to stop it happening. It felt a bit like a betrayal, but it was completely outside Ron's control.

In the flesh, Ron acknowledged that Shego was physically attractive, but her personality, and the way she never failed to find a dismissive put-down to toss at him when their paths crossed, more than counteracted any physical attraction he felt.

At least, when he was awake it did.

But the one thing all of the women who inadvertently starred in Ron's erotic dreams had in common was that he had no problem at all imagining them naked. And the only one of them he had ever actually seen naked was Tara, when - despite his best efforts not to look while he was stuck in Kim's body and in the Cheerleaders locker room - he had walked straight into a trash can and opened his eyes at just the wrong (right?) moment as Tara walked out of the shower. That had felt strange - being turned on in Kim's body. Lots of strange sensations.

Ron shuddered.

In hindsight, Ron wished he had at least sneaked a peak in a mirror while getting out of the shower when he had had Kim's body. Because now, try as he might, he just couldn't imagine Kim nude in his mind's eye. He wanted to be able to picture her on her back, naked and sweaty, her fingernails dug into his arms, screaming his name, but he just couldn't form the mental image, either when he was awake or dreaming. And what teenage boy who found himself in the body of a super-attractive teenage girl for a couple of days wouldn't look, feel, poke, prod and play with it while he had it?

Answer: Ron Stoppable.

He didn't look down in the shower, he didn't touch anything he didn't absolutely have to and then no more than strictly necessary and he never even looked. He had no idea what Kim was doing with his body while she had it, and they had both never spoken of it, but he had a grumbling unfounded suspicion that she must have done more with his body than he had done with hers. Perhaps he just felt like an idiot for not doing more with the opportunity of a teenage boy's lifetime. For always looking away when Kim inadvertently flashed some flesh during a mission. For just being so... well... Ron.

This train of thought was rudely interrupted by the heavy thud of the main gear hitting Japanese tarmac, and before very long Ron was waiting for the baggage carousel to disgorge his luggage.

"Travel light, Ron-san", Sensei had said, so he only had the one hold-all to collect. It was first off the carousel, so he was able to beat the rush to immigration and customs, and before long he was emerging onto the airport concourse, looking for Yori.

Yori! He had completely forgotten Yori!

Kim had told him months ago that Yori 'liked him'. He had indeed long 'liked' her; enough to march into combat with Monkey Fist and his monkey ninja minions to rescue her, and to recover the Lotus blade. Perhaps if he had known that the attraction was mutual earlier, he might have done something about it. But then, he hadn't been in touch with her since Kim had told him, and he certainly could have written to her, emailed her, even phoned her! And now she was about to meet him off the plane and he was going to have to tell her that he had just now got together with Kim! He was tempted to turn around and get the first plane back to Middleton before he saw her!

But she wasn't here yet. And departures were downstairs. And he didn't have a ticket; or enough money to buy one. So that was pretty much that. But if he was staying, he really had to phone Kim, so he made his way first to the nearby Bureau de Change, and then with a handful of Yen to the massed banks of payphones on the far side of the arrival hall. Then he dialled Kim, getting the international code prefix right first time, for the first time ever. It wasn't a very satisfactory conversation, given that the call was diverted at the exchange from the direct line into Kim's bedroom, via some of Wade's trickery and several satellites, to Kim's Kimunicator, and found Kim in the middle of one of her regular punishing ten-mile uphill training runs. But at least he got to speak to her, tell her where he would be, and apologise for leaving suddenly and for not being there for a while. All this while feeding a rapidly shrinking pile of change into the payphone as fast as his fingers could manage.

Kim sounded a little disappointed, as far as he could tell, in between gasping for breath, but said she didn't mind and would see him when he got back.

And then the money - and Kim - were gone. He wasn't worried about her; he knew that she could more than take care of herself, and he also knew that if she needed him - really needed him - that Wade would find him wherever he was. But he did feel like something very important had been rudely interrupted.

He turned and scanned the arrivals hall, again looking for Yori, and at first overlooking the thin, wiry Japanese man who appeared to be waiting patiently to use the payphone Ron had just finished speaking on. Then he realised that there were another thirty similar phones next to it, and that the man must be waiting respectfully for him.

He made eye contact, and the man bowed and approached him; as he got closer, Ron recognised him as one of the senior students at Yamanouchi. No Yori? Had something happened to Yori?

"Greetings, Ron-san, I am Kazuki, and I have been sent to meet you and escort you to Yamanouchi. Please follow me!" said the wiry man, picking up Ron's holdall and striding towards the exit.

Ron followed, somewhat concerned. "Normally Yori-chan comes to meet me. Is she OK?".

"Yori-chan very busy. Sensei ask me to come in her place today".

Ron was barely reassured by this. The mystery upon which he had brooded for the entire journey to the base of the mountain, and the climb up to the school, was quickly solved once he reached the top. He found a subdued Yori waiting for him on the far side of the final bridge leading to the school. Suddenly from being concerned for her safety, Ron was again wishing he could turn around and go home.

"Ron-san, there is something I must tell you", blurted Yori, without even looking him in the eye, and before he could begin his own confession. "In the last few weeks I have become very close to Hirotaka-san. I am very very sorry, Stoppable-san."

"Oh!" he exclaimed, relieved that his own admission wasn't going to be the bombshell it might have been. Then he realised that relief was perhaps not the appropriate emotion to express at that moment and added another "Oh!", in a more subdued tone. For a moment he toyed with not telling her about himself and Kim, but he realised that perhaps this was not either honourable or sustainable. He picked his next words unusually carefully.

"Yori, in the last week, myself and Kim have also become close... closer. Therefore I am happy for you, and glad that I have not brought you great sadness with this news...".

He watched Yori's face run the gamut of the full range of emotions in a few seconds, from relief to jealousy to anger, before settling back to relief. It was a tense couple of seconds, but afterwards, as Yori broke into a smile, he felt as if a weight was being lifted from his shoulders. He smiled back, and Yori said "I am very happy for you and Kim-chan, Stoppable-san!".

"Booyah!", he exclaimed happily. "Kim said Hirotaka was like super-cool, so I know it's all good!".

Yori bowed almost imperceptibly.

"Now, my world traveller watch says it's breakfast time in Japan, and I'm starving!"

At the mention of breakfast, Rufus suddenly stirred in his pocket for the first time since he had hoovered up most of Ron's last unappetising economy-class airline meal, and poked his head eagerly out into the daylight to smack his lips loudly.

Yori giggled "Always with the American style food-related jokes, Stoppable-san. Sensei has been waiting for you to arrive. I will take you to him.". Ron and Rufus groaned as one, as Ron trudged into Yamanouchi after her...

oOo

"Greetings, Stoppable-san!" said Sensei, warmly, as Ron was shown in to his small pagoda.

Ron grinned and said "Hi!", cheerily, and then felt a violent dig in his thigh from Rufus and took the hint to bow in the traditional fashion. Sensei returned the bow and then opened his hand serenely towards the steps leading down to his personal formal garden, to the rear of his pagoda.

"Stoppable-san, I have something of supreme importance to ask of you..." he said, gravely, as they made their way slowly down the steps and into the tiny oasis of serenity.

The sound of trickling water filled the air, accompanied only by the sound of birdsong and the occasional small splash as an ornamental carp broke surface of the large carp pond which was the central feature of the garden.

Ron's only reply came by way of a loud rumble from his stomach, which was vying for his attention with the sense of apprehension he felt at what Sensei might be about to ask of him. He was quite resigned to the idea that it would probably involve monkeys. He again followed Sensei's silent lead across a small, ornate wooden bridge over the pond. As they crossed the water, a startled frog chimed in with a loud 'Ribbet' and then leapt into the water from a lily pad with a splash.

Presently, they arrived at a pair of stone benches on a small flagstone island in the middle of the pond.

"I usually come here to meditate, Stoppable-san", he said, indicating to Ron that he should sit on one of the benches. Only once they were comfortably seated (or as comfortably seated as one can be on a rough stone bench), and Rufus had emerged from Ron's pocket to sit attentively on his thigh, did Sensei begin to speak.

"What I am to tell you now has been passed down through the generations, from each Sensei of Yamanouchi to his successor, for almost 17 centuries. It is the tale of the foundation of the Yamanouchi, and of the debt of honour that gave it first a purpose and then a name. It has been passed on, in the belief that one day the mystical monkey power might return, and also because that debt of honour could and can now never be fully repaid. Once this tale was told to all the recipients of mystical monkey power, and now it can be told again to a true mystical monkey master!".

Ron shifted a little uncomfortably. Partly because his stomach growled menacingly again, and partly because he was well aware that his flickering inner mystical monkey seemed to come and go without asking him first. Perhaps Rufus was a more appropriate audience, he mused.

"Listen well, Stoppable-san!", said Sensei. "In the year 306AD, the great warrior Toshimiru and his followers were on a long journey from the west that had them passing near the a village called Sosumiha, some seventy-five kilometres to the east of here. They had made an epic voyage across the East China Sea to the land then called Manchuria, where Toshimiru and his disciples had first found the monkey idols and the mystical monkey power..."

Slowly, and painstakingly, Sensei re-told the story of the village of Sosumiha, the selfless sacrifice of the head man Yamanouchi, and the sacred vow of Toshimuru. And as he spoke, Ron and Rufus were both captivated by the tale. And even though the story had been passed down by word of mouth alone, from outgoing Sensei to incoming over forty times since the death of Master Fujiwara, and allowing for Master Fujiwara speaking in early Japanese while Sensei re-told the story in English, nothing of any import, save the ravages of history itself, and the new chapters that it added, had changed in the epic tale.

"...and initiates from Yamanouchi continued to make the trek to maintain the grave of the head man of the village until the year AD 507, when the village of Sosumiha vanished from the map overnight. We now know that the rains were so heavy that year that they had softened the entire western face of Mount Hamkenjutsi. When the ground was at its most waterlogged, a small and unremarkable earth tremor shook the valley. Eight billion litres of mud slurry poured down from the mountain in just a few minutes, filling the valley and changing the landscape forever. Sosumiha was obliterated and entombed under hundreds of feet of rocky soil."

Ron and Rufus both sat slack jawed and misty eyed at this twist in the tale, but Sensei spoke on...

"When Master Fujiwara first rejoined his ancestors, the village Shaman noted that Toshimiru's magical armour did not turn to dust, as the armour that had been forged for the other original guardians had done upon their passing. It had not done so when Master Toshimiru had passed, because the Cuff of Sosumiha had ensured that for as long as there was Mystical Monkey Power in the world, there would always be somebody with the physical form of Master Toshimuru to wear the armour. But with the passing of Master Fujiwara, it seemed that mystical monkey power had gone from the world forever. Yet, the Shaman believed, correctly as it turns out, if the armour was still intact, that meant that mystical monkey power would one day return to the earth, and she reasoned that the Guardians would surely then return to continue protecting Sosumiha. In order to be ready for their return, the villagers built a shrine in the hidden cave where Toshimuru and his warriors had first been concealed by the villagers. The armour, and the Cuff of Sosumiha, were kept there, ready for the day when the guardians would return to the village. Sadly, the shaman had long joined her ancestors by the time of the cataclysm that overtook the village, a cataclysm that she might have predicted had the tradition of a village shaman been maintained. And thus it was that the entire population of Sosumiha perished, and the Cuff of Sosumiha was lost forever under hundreds of feet of mud and rock, along with Master Toshimiru's magical battle armour. The only living souls who even knew of the existence of these priceless artefacts were here at Yamanouchi.

"And here the ancient tale should end. But in 1962, the expressway you used to arrive here from the airport was built. An intersection was to be built right in the shadow of Mount Hamkenjutsi, but it was found that the ground was very unstable, with many voids; this was the very mud and rock that had covered Sosumiha almost one and a half millenia earlier. A young construction worker was assigned to the crew who drove in piles to underpin and stabilise the ground. One day he pulled his machinery up from a deep, deep pile shaft he had drilled to find that in amongst the earth and tree roots adhering to it was a rather unusual bracelet. He retrieved it, cleaned it and took it home to show his wife, who was not impressed. The construction worker put the strange bracelet in a drawer and forgot all about it. He did take it out one day years later to tell his young son the tale of how he had come by it, but it went back into the same drawer again until the father rejoined his ancestors earlier this year.

"Three months ago, one of our senior students, Master Hirotaka, who has studied the history of the Guardians of Sosumiha with great diligence in the past, was apparently doing some meditative research on something called... Ebay", said Sensei, struggling a little with the 21st century terminology. "At the same time, the son of that construction worker was clearing his sadly departed parent's old house and disposing of curios for which he had no space himself, via this Ebay. The... err... listing... caught the attention of Master Hirotaka, who upon reading the story of its finding, purchased the bracelet, suspecting that it might indeed miraculously be the Cuff of Sosumiha. Since he acquired the bracelet, our scholars have been studying it and we are of the opinion that Master Hirotakas instincts were entirely correct, and that this...", Sensei paused and pulled a small cloth bundle from under his bench, then reverentially unfolded the cloth to reveal what Ron considered a fairly hideous and chunky bracelet, "...is the Cuff of Sosumiha!"


	10. The way of the Iron Nacho

Ron reached out with both hands and carefully took the bulky, and unusual looking bracelet from the Sensei of the Yamanouchi School, studying it closely with an expression of startled wonder.

The bracelet, which might or might not be the mythical Cuff of Sosumiha, was very distinctive, and not in a good way. It had strange hieroglyphs carved around its outer face, hieroglyphs which didn't seem reminiscent of either Chinese or Japanese cultural tradition. But whatever the heritage of the bracelet he was studying, it was very definitely ugly, he decided.

He realised that Sensei was speaking again... "...and if this is the Cuff of Sosumiha then it is my hope that we can use its power to...NO, STOPPABLE-SAN, WAIT!"

Too late, as Ron had absent mindedly flipped the chunky bracelet over his wrist and snapped the clasp closed. At that very instant Ron felt a sudden, momentary constricting pain all over his body, and heard what sounded like a small explosion. Then he realised that he was now looking slightly down on Sensei, rather than across at him, and that the air appeared to be full of little bits of cotton.

It was all a bit disorienting.

Especially when he opened his mouth to say 'Sensei, what just happened?' and heard it come out in a voice that made even the hairs on the back of his own neck stand up.

His feet were still painful, and rather felt as if they had been driven over by a lorry, his ears were ringing, and he was experiencing several other amazing sensations that he couldn't quite process, but when he looked down, two things became clear.

Firstly, he was naked. And he was definitely somebody else. It took a second of looking at his throbbing feet, and the remains of his sneakers which were splayed out underneath them as if they had exploded from within, before he realised what had happened. He had grown in size by what felt like a couple of feet in every dimension, and his clothes... hadn't! In fact, scraps of familiar looking cloth swirled all around him. The ringing in his ears started to subside and he realised that Sensei was looking concerned and asking him if he was alright.

"I think so..." said Ron. He experimentally wiggled his feet and was gratified to find that the pain was receding to a dull ache, and that they still seemed to work. "Wow... that was intense! Hey... where's the bracelet?" he asked, staring at his bare but muscular wrist, and feeling it with his other hand, in case it was merely invisible.

"It is now a part of you", explained Sensei, "According to the legend, you need only concentrate and think of removing it and you will once again be separate from it. But not yet, please - I have first to become accustomed to the fact that we have found the legendary Cuff of Sosumiha, and that I am the first man for close to two millenia to look into the living face of the founder of Yamanouchi, the mighty warrior Toshimuru! Also..."

"Wait!" said Ron, urgently, "Where's Rufus! He was sitting on my thigh!". He sprung to his feet and spun around with a lithe grace that belied his new stature, looking for any sign of his pint-sized pink friend, and apprehensive about what he might see.

He was both relieved and concerned in equal measure that there was no trace of Rufus anywhere on the little island, but he bounced athletically up on to the stone bench he had previously been sitting on, landing on the irregular polka dot rag that had previously been the seat of his boxer shorts before he had so radically inflated.

"Rufus!" he called loudly, still surprised by the almost earth-shaking timbre of his voice, scanning the garden with what he found to be particularly hawk-like eyes, looking for the little pink naked mole rat.

At first he saw nothing, and heard only the splashing of the carp and the frogs as they broke surface in the giant ornamental pond, but then his hearing, which also seemed more acute than he was used to, detected a different kind of splash, from directly in front of where he had been sitting. He swivelled his head in time to see a bedraggled naked mole rat dragging himself onto a lily pad, coughing somewhat and with a mildly dazed expression. "Rufus!" he called again, this time his voice laden with relief and happiness. "Booyah!"

Rufus froze for a second, stared at him and then said... "Ron?" in his best rather vocally challenged chitter.

"Yes, it's me, little buddy, I grew!" he replied, as if that was all the explanation Rufus might need. Rufus seemed to mutter something to himself, as he nibbled through the lily stem, grabbed a broken reed to use as a paddle, and started sculling himself slowly towards the island. Ron couldn't always make out exactly what he was saying at the best of times, but he surmised from the knitted brow and the continuous low-volume chunter that Rufus was less than happy about his unscheduled flight and subsequent ditching and held Ron responsible for it. But Ron instinctively knew he wouldn't bear a grudge. Well, he hoped not.

Ron was distracted from the slowly approaching aquatic mole rat by a high pitched gasp from the direction of the bridge. He glanced across to see a young woman, in the grey shinobi shozoko of an instructor, standing on the threshold of the island and carrying a black bundle. He turned to face her, still standing on the bench, and was taken aback when she dropped the bundle and gave an even higher pitched squeal, then stood statuesque as if struck dumb by shock or awe.

"Stoppable-san, I was about to mention that clothing is an issue. I was intending to suggest that you addressed this before you donned the Cuff of Sosumiha, which is why I asked Meko-chan to bring you the garment we had made for you, but it would seem that I misjudged your eagerness to experiment. However, you may have forgotten in the excitement, Stoppable-san, that you are standing on a pedestal as naked as the day you were born!".

Sensei was right, Ron had forgotten! He looked down and noticed, seemingly for the first time, that below his muscular barrel chest and clearly defined washboard abdominal muscles, L'il Ron... who... err... wasn't even a bit L'il any more... was swinging free in the breeze! He snatched a slightly panic stricken look at the poor woman who was still standing transfixed, but seemed to be extremely flushed, and unable to drag her eyes away from the naked man standing before her. To spare her blushes, Ron guessed that the bundle was something for him to wear, so he clasped his now enormous hands over his equally enormous manhood, hopped off his bench and padded over to pick it up. He was surprised to hear the woman start to whimper very quietly as he got close to her, then bowed and collected the bundle.

The woman sighed loudly when he turned and walked back to Sensei, and as he did so, he could almost feel her eyes burning a hole in his butt. He was almost relieved to make it back to the stone bench, from which he swept all trace of his former wardrobe before dumping the bundle and extracting a pair of fairly unremarkable looking underpants that would have fitted him before his sudden expansion.

"Err... Sensei...", he objected, holding the offending article up for his inspection.

"Stoppable-san, fear not, these garments have been tailored largely from a specially woven fabric, similar to but much more elastic than lycra. You will find that they can comfortably accommodate you, whichever form you are in."

A sceptical Ron found himself converted as he was able to don socks, shoes, underwear and a shinobi shozoko, all of which looked ideally sized for the Ronmeister in his original dimensions, but all of which fitted Toshimuru's outrageously ripped physique perfectly, and as an added bonus, as a result of the skill of the tailor no doubt, he found that he still looked like a man in a shinobi shozoku rather than like a side of beef wrapped in a giant stretch-lycra condom.

Immediately he was dressed, he turned to the instructor in the grey garb and apologised very self-consciously for flashing her.

"No, please, believe me", she said, in heavily accented English, while blushing an even deeper shade of crimson, "Absolutely no apology is necessary!". She bowed and started to back over the bridge, only turning to walk away once (as Ron later worked out) her eyes had dropped below the level of the crown of the bridge, interrupting her view of him. Ron returned her bow, for want of something else to do, and said "Well.. err... sorry anyway!" as she retreated. He turned again to Sensei, only to find that he was now sitting in the Lotus position about three feet off the ground, and drifting backwards over the pond.

"Sensei?" he asked, quizically?

"Now that we have found the legendary Cuff of Sosumiha, there is one more question we must know the answer to, before we know whether we can actually use this powerful magic for the greater good. We must test it a little...", responded Sensei.

"Test it? Actually, I was kind of hoping to be testing the breakfast menu right ab..." started Ron.

Then at that instant, he sensed it, a breath of air from a silent movement, the sniff of adrenaline, the sound of human sinew tautening, the pump of blood, the splash of a bead of sweat falling. And suddenly he was experiencing what could only be described as a flashback. To somewhere he had never been and doing something he had never done. A jagged lightning flash, pouring rain, four ninja with homicidal intent leaping at him, swords flashing as he ruthlessly wielded the Lotus blade... and then in less than half a heartbeat he was back on the island, as four dark shapes leapt at him from beneath the surface of the pond, at the four points of the compass, in a simultaneous attack.

Before he had even fully got to grips with what was happening, he found himself low to the floor, executing a perfect 'Wooden Monkey Sweeps Forest Floor' kick, upending one assailant violently, while simultaneously taking another over his head with 'Stone Monkey Throws Fallen Tree', and athletically dodging the other two attackers. Then he landed lightly on the low wall surrounding the island, as one of the four dark shapes that had attacked him was now a black clad heap on the floor, and then half a second later a second assailant fell with a loud splash into the water of the pond.

Already, Ron's hand was raised, ready to pluck the Lotus blade from the air and despatch his attackers. His mind had reached out, and had told him that the Lotus blade was close, very close, when he had first felt the looming presence of his attackers, and without thinking about it, he had summoned it to his defence. He hadn't heard it smash through the side of the shrine in which it was kept, nor seen the duty guards dive out of the way as it slammed through the side of the building in an explosion of rubble, taking its heavy wooden display case with it, but in his mind's eye he knew it was coming to him and he knew it was constrained, so he bade it change form in mid-air, picking shapes that would smash the sword-shaped display case to fragments as it flew unerringly to his hand.

The heavy crate had already crashed unceremoniously through the tiled roof covering the walkway at the back of Sensei's secluded garden, and then fallen away in a blizzard of splintered wood, as the Lotus blade shape-shifted from giant battle-axe back to its standard form of a Katana, when he realised that the man lying on the floor was 'armed' only with a Shinai, a bamboo practice sword. And then he realised that he recognised one of the other two remaining dripping wet assailants. It was Yori. But the fans she was holding in an aggressive fighting stance were definitely not made of steel. Rubber or plastic maybe? And the last would-be attacker was carrying a Jo stick. Lethal if used with lethal intent, but used frequently for sparring practice at Yamanouchi.

He understood the nature of Sensei's 'test' now. The downed student, who Ron had taken no prisoners with whatsoever when he slammed him to the ground head first, groaned in pain and moved, and from the far side of the pond, there was also much splashing and cursing as the attacker who Ron had hurled a clear ten metres to a fortuitously soft landing fought to stand up amongst the mud and the weeds and extricate himself from the pond. Ron was extremely grateful that both his victims were still breathing at all - had he already been armed, he realised that he could have easily killed all four of them in the blink of an eye. Even unarmed, he had a nasty suspicion that it was pure luck that he hadn't instinctively snapped any necks or ruptured any internal organs, as he defended himself.

The Lotus blade arrived in his hand just as he closed his fingers around it, and he slashed the air in front of him brutally, momentarily letting go with a blaze of bright neon-blue light and a blood-curdling battle cry. In truth, he hadn't been intending to put mortal fear into anybody, but the power of Toshimuru's epic voice was incredible. He was rewarded by a momentary flinch from both his remaining antagonists. What effect might he cause if he meant to intimidate, he wondered? In truth, he was so relieved that he hadn't done anybody a mortal injury that he burst into a dopey grin immediately after the fearsome yell, cut the glow, and the Lotus blade rearranged itself into a Jo stick with a pop.

He turned to Sensei, who was sitting impassively in mid-air a few yards away, and complained "Sensei, that was not cool. I'm getting freaky things happening in my head and I could have killed somebody! Please, don't go surprising me l...".

At that moment, Yori & the other black clad faux assailant leapt at him together. As they flew towards him, in a co-ordinated strike, it seemed to Ron that he had all the time in the world to decide what to do about it. He really didn't want to hurt either of them, especially Yori, and if he left them on the floor in a heap, then even if he didn't seriously injure them, it was probably going to leave them in a world of hurt for a while. But he couldn't just keep dodging them and waiting for them to wear themselves out; he wanted breakfast! Perhaps if he dumped them into the pond, that would suffice?

The man with Yori had longer legs and his Jo stick had a longer reach, so he got into range of Ron first and launched a rapid 'Wooden Monkey Beats Coconut Tree With Stick' strike directly at his ribs. To Ron, it seemed to come so apparently slowly, even though he knew in reality it was just a blur. Consequently, Ron was not only able to easily block the strike with the Lotus blade, but with a deft flick of the wrist at the moment of impact, he sent his opponents Jo stick flying end over end away high into the air.

Even as he swung the Lotus blade come Jo stick in a reverse arc, he had already mentally identified nine alternative instant follow-up Jo strikes, six of which would have been fatal, two merely permanently crippling and one that would have smashed several minor bones.

Instead he settled for a simple and deliberately gently delivered 'Stone Monkey Taps Walnut Tree' strike that took both his feet out from under him and dropped him flat on his back, temporarily putting him out of the fray. Just in time to let him deal with an onrushing Yori, by dodging beneath the slash of one of her plastic fans and setting the Lotus blade in the form of a Jo stick against his own planted foot, at just the perfect moment to catch her.

Catch her he did, just below her centre of gravity with the end of the Jo, and he executed a perfect 'Tall Monkey Levers Giant Banana Bunch' stick throw, using her own momentum against her. Ron watched for half a second while Yori twisted in the air, like a cat falling from a window ledge, as she attempted instinctively to land in a fighting stance. But Ron well knew what was coming, as he turned his attention to the remaining quarter of the 'test', who was springing athletically back to his feet, now with the Shinai dropped by the other floored assailant in his hand. The loud splash and the single, very uncharacteristic, high pitched Japanese curse word which followed confirmed that Yori had landed in the carp pond, and was now knee deep in mud and soaked from head to toe.

Ron didn't have time to ponder the fact that he didn't speak Japanese, but had somehow understood exactly what Yori had yelled when she landed, because the final black-clad warrior had moved straight back in to the attack with his Shinai, and with the Lotus blade now also in the form of a bamboo practice sword, battle was well and truly joined.

In truth it would have been over in half a second if it had been for real, as Ron deflected the incoming Shinai strike, feinted a counter strike to his opponent's head, and then came underneath in a raking 'Wooden Monkey Deadheads Rose Bushes' slash that would have disembowelled his assailant had it been made with a razor sharp sword. As it was, though, Ron was waiting for an opportunity to send the masked 'swordsman' facing him flying into the furthest corner of the pond, so he continued the swordplay. Or perhaps he should have said 'childs-play'.

This was embarrassingly easy, he realised. He found that reading the minute twitches of his opponent's muscles and sinews, before he had even moved perceptibly, was so trivially simple that he didn't even need to concentrate on the task at hand. Reading his opponent's eyes was no harder, neither was predicting his attacks and his feints, nor knowing instinctively what his own options were in response, in real time. Time was also something he seemed to have lots of - he knew he was moving quickly, but he had so much time to execute his chosen strategy that if he had wanted to, he was sure he could have abandoned strategy or analysis of his opponent's next move altogether and merely reacted to each attack as it happened, yet still beaten his assailant to the punch. As his mind wandered, he also marvelled at the vast repertoire of techniques that was instantly at his command the moment he thought of them. He could call to mind techniques for fighting with any weapon he could imagine, and a range of everyday objects as well. Even as he wondered at it, he realised that he now knew a battery of techniques for offence and defence with everything from chopsticks to a coffee table.

The masked 'swordsman' leapt at him with a complex double feint move, leading with a 'Wooden Monkey Chops Tree' neck strike which was designed to look like a feint for a 'Stone Monkey Deadheads Rose Bushes' disembowelling slash, but the 'Stone Monkey Deadheads Rose Bushes' was actually a feint for a low sweeping 'Stone Monkey Trims Tall Grass' attack that would have severed him at the knees had it been a real sword... and had he not bounced lightly over the attack in a cartwheel, his Shinai tapping his incredibly industrious opponent on top of the head with a 'Stone Monkey Splits Melon' strike as he flew by to indicate to him that he had just been sliced in half again.

Ron landed lightly, off to the side of his masked assailant, who was now almost imperceptibly struggling to control his breathing. Amazingly, he realised, that last feat of incredible martial and athletic prowess had been as easy, as natural, and as dependant on forethought and concentration as scratching an itch on the end of his nose would have been. Which is to say he hadn't even had to think about it! Previously, when mystical monkey power had come to him in moments of overwhelming need, he hadn't dared think about what he was doing, because thinking about it was almost guaranteed to banish his inner monkey back to its hiding place, usually at a moment when it would have been... inconvenient. Mystical Monkey Power had been elusive and intangible 'something', always at the edge of his consciousness like a movement glimpsed out of the corner of his eye. Whenever he had reached for it, it was never there, and when it came to him in combat it was always a welcome but unexpected surprise.

Now, ever since he had snapped on the Cuff of Sosumiha, it wasn't an elusive 'something' any more, it was all around him, it engulfed him, consumed him. It wasn't something he had to reach for, it was him! Which is why his mind was boggling at the wonder of it all, even as he was leaping almost absent-mindedly over a slightly ragged 'Reverse Stone Monkey Trims Tall Grass' strike. All in all he was overwhelmed by the experience. Not only was he entirely comfortable with the experience of Mystical Monkey Power in full measure, but he had also found the whole thing about being inside a body other than his own to be completely free of drama. And that was something he would never have predicted! It was entirely unlike either of his two previous theoretically similar experiences - the body swap with Kim, and the molecular muscle enhancement ring.

When he had swapped consciousnesses with Kim, he had been inside her brain courtesy of Drakken's infernal machine, which meant, as he later learned courtesy of a long conversation with Mrs Dr Possible, that he had access to her muscle memory and her motor cortex. This had pretty much meant that he had been OK so long as he didn't think too much about what he was doing. Let Kim's body get on with walking and reaching for objects and it was fine. Whenever he tried to think about asking Kim's limbs to do anything specific, it was invariably an uncoordinated disaster. His mental map of his body was completely at odds with the reality of hers as well – he ducked for low branches that were above Kim's head, for example, and two or three times he very painfully whacked the sides of Kim's breasts when turning rapidly in confined spaces, leaving - he suspected but never actually checked - some rather nasty bruises.

He knew that Kim had had similar issues in his body, even though they had never spoken of it, because when he got his own body back, there were at least two very painful 'should have ducked' style lumps on his forehead and a dull ache from his groin that hinted at some kind of accidental impact to the meat and two veg while Kim was in charge of it. An impact that Ron was sure must have been incredibly painful at the time!

The molecular muscle enhancement ring was different in one obvious respect, but otherwise it was more of the same. At least it was basically his body under the muscle, and his hands and feet were in the same place they had always been which made basic hand-eye co-ordination a doddle, but all the extra muscle bulk was outside of his mental map of his body. He was pretty sure that if he had worn the ring long enough he would have got used to being wider than a refrigerator with thighs like tree trunks, but for the brief time he wore the infernal thing, moving through a world filled with walls and corners remained an alien and bruise-filled experience.

But right now, he was at least as comfortable in this body as he was in his own, perhaps even more so, despite it being so entirely different in every single dimension. The magic of the Cuff of Sosumiha was obviously far more sophisticated than the crude technology of Jack Hench's bio-chemistry warping jewelry!

Anyway, breakfast was calling him ever more loudly, so Ron decided to move things along. He dropped easily into a Lost Monkey stance, and began swaying, hopping from foot to foot in front of his exhausted opponent, inviting an attack, presenting opening after opening. It was only a few seconds before the masked master of monkey ninjitsu facing him took the bait, and lunged into a powerful but ill-judged 'Stone Monkey Slices Mango' attack, which was exactly the riposte that Ron was inviting at the time.

The slashing Shinai made only a few inches progress before it met the waiting Lotus Blade. A deft and precise flick of Ron's wrists and the incoming Shinai was suddenly outgoing, skittering away across the stone flags of the island towards the bridge. Ron then segued seamlessly into a 'Reverse Lost Monkey Flails Forest Floor' feint, which as intended provoked the now disarmed and profusely sweating monkey ninja to leap over the anticipated low sweep. As his target left the ground, Ron was letting go of the Lotus Blade, and stepping in to a two-handed 'Tall Monkey Soft Paws of Power Pushes Over Tree', focussing his chi straight into the hapless airborne man's solar plexus with a bowel-loosening "Kyyyyah!"

The recipient was fired upwards and backwards some distance with arms flailing, before he plummeted into the carp pond. He landed perilously close to the far edge of the water, flat on his back with an enormous muddy splash, but before the flailing fighter had reached the apogee of his flight, Ron had summoned the Lotus Blade to hand once again, and as it reformed into its default katana-like form, Ron had assumed a relaxed Tall Monkey defensive stance.

Again Ron turned to Sensei, intending to suggest that since he had now aced the test, he'd like to enter mano-a-mano combat with a serious breakfast. However, he was surprised to see Sensei floating further away, and as he watched, the old man landed softly on the path surrounding the pond.

"Stoppable-san, you have demonstrated extraordinary mastery of Tai Sheng Pek Kwar, the like of which I have never previously been privileged to witness. I consider myself lucky to have been present for such a demonstration of skill and martial prowess. However, there is one more test that I had prepared..." said Sensei, speaking loudly to bridge the distance between them.

Ron was just wondering what this other test might involve, when out of the corner of his eye, he sensed rather than saw a movement. Glancing to his left, he saw the grey-clad instructor who had earlier brought him his clothes pulling sharply on a rope. At that moment, he heard a chorus of twanging bowstrings, and suddenly he was once again completely overwhelmed by what he could have sworn was a vivid flashback, if only it was of somewhere he recognised.

He was standing in a valley on a brilliant sunny day, surrounded by blood, gore and dismembered corpses, and standing shoulder to shoulder with several other warriors, when the sky was suddenly darkened by a volley of arrows coming straight for him...

47 miles away from Yamanouchi, a small earth tremor began to shake the foundations of the Mount Hamkenjutsi freeway exit.

Even as the disturbing hallucination dispelled itself, the Lotus Blade was taking the form of a shield in his hand, and he was leaping into a position to avoid several of the incoming projectiles, which had been fired from three directions simultaneously. He left himself with four arrows to intercept, the other seven passing harmlessly around him. Three slammed into the shield, leaving one, heading for his face, which he deflected away from his body with a perfectly timed arrow-cutting block. Then there was silence, broken only by the distant clatter of arrows bouncing off the walls of the formal garden. Ron dimly noticed that the broken arrows lying on the ground had round leather bags in place of traditional arrowheads. Probably designed not to be lethal, they still looked like they would be mightily painful if they hit you. Then he replayed the earlier 'flashback' in his mind, and decided that enough was enough. He threw down the Lotus Blade, once more in the form of a sword, and after a moment of concentration, he shrank back into his own body, the heavy Cuff of Sosumiha appearing as a donut-shaped bulge under his sleeve, and then sliding down his wrist and emerging into his hand.

47 miles away from Yamanouchi, the earth tremor stopped as abruptly as it had begun.

Ron turned to face Sensei, holding up the Cuff... "Sensei, this thing was giving me really freaky hallucinations. I mean, like the stuff of nightmares. And worse than that they aren't bothering me at all! I don't want anything at all to do with it if it is going to turn me into a mass-murdering psychopath!".

"Hallucinations, Stoppable-San? That is a cause for concern! I must consult the Yamanouchi shaman before we can risk further testing!" said Sensei.

Ron sighed with relief. Just at that moment, Rufus poked his head over the wall surrounding the island and chittered at him angrily. And then the pin that released the 12th bowstring belatedly popped out of its hole. Better late than never, the 12th arrow flew straight and true towards the back of Ron's head...


	11. Lo Pin's Island

22 August 2011

15:54

When Kim Possible appeared outside Dr Director's office the morning after the night before, and pushed the button to announce herself, there were few outward signs of the traumatic few hours she had so recently spent huddled on her bathroom floor. Perhaps if you knew her well, there were just the hints of bags under her eyes, and if you stared deeply into those same eyes, they were perhaps slightly colder than they had been just twelve hours earlier.

Compartmentalization really was almost a reflex for Kim, but nothing had ever been harder for Kim to put to the back of her mind than what she had seen from that dungeon on her closet door. Thus, despite her recent tribulations, when Kim was buzzed in to Dr Director's office, she gave her customary cheery greeting and then added "And good morning Wade..."

Right on cue, Wade popped up on Betty Director's giant wall mounted video screen, and Kim noticed, and took secret delight in, the brief scowl of irritation that flitted across the eye-patch adorned Global Justice Director's normally impassive face. "Please sit down, Kim, and we can begin. Mr Load, may I have my screen back please?"

Wade didn't answer, but he did vanish, replaced once again by the Global Justice logo; both Betty Director & Kim were well aware that he was still watching and listening. "Thank you", said Dr Director, then paused for a moment before launching into the mission briefing with the practiced ease of somebody who had done it a thousand times before. Kim knew what to expect from her. 'Ground, Situation, Mission, Execution...', yadda yadda yadda. But Dr Director always gave 'good briefing', so far as she could judge... "Before I begin, I need to tell you that the following briefing is classified Top Secret. You may discuss nothing I am about to tell you with anybody outside this room unless expressly authorised by me. In addition, some of what I am about to tell you is also classified as Top Secret by signatory states to the Wolsberg Concordat, and under the terms of the Concordat you are also subject to criminal sanction under the national secrecy laws of the relevant signatory state or states. Do you understand?" Kim nodded her assent. She had heard the same spiel several times.

"OK, theatre of operations!", Dr Director began, in confident style. "This...", said Betty Director, tapping a button on her side ofthe desk which displayed a rotating 3D globe on the big screen, complete with relief maps of the continents, "...is Lo Pin's Island".

As she spoke, the globe stopped spinning over the Western Pacific, and then the graphic zoomed in first to the South China Sea, and then to the area South of Taiwan but North of a little cluster of almost invisible pinpricks labelled on the map as 'The Paracel Islands'. Finally the map zoomed in to the middle of the blue expanse of nothing until a tiny spec k appeared and grew into a 3D representation of what looked like a very big rock growing out the ocean. The 3D image morphed into a graphical fly-around of the island, and Kim got a sense of the scale of it from the tiny images of palm trees that became visible in the few places where there was a very narrow strip of sandy beach around the base of the imposing rock. Kim knew enough geography and geology to recognise that the black rock that towered several hundred feet above the sea at a slight angle was the volcanic plug from a volcano which had become extinct hundreds of millions of years ago. It reminded here very much of the Devils Tower in Wyoming, which she had seen once out of the window of her ride on the way back from a mission, but this was much, much bigger. And black. Only on the Southern side of the giant black basalt rock was there any more than a few yards of dry land, and that only in a wide but flat and tapering tail of palm-tree covered sand that decayed into a submerged sand bar and then a coral reef. Dr Director was patient while Kim studied the image intently, and waited until the teenager's eyes switched back to meet her one good one. "This island was first discovered and claimed by the Chinese under various names during the Chin dynasty, over 2,000 years ago, but they could find no purpose to occupying it, and it remained uninhabited thereafter. In the late 19th century a German merchant trader became lost in a typhoon, re-discovered the island and claimed it eponymously for Germany as 'Klaustaffen Island'. Although it was added to the list of German possessions in the Pacific administered by the Colonial Office, it is believed that it received just a single 'sail-by' visit from a German Cruiser on a tour of German Pacific Colonies during the next 30 years. "At the end of the First World War, Germany surrendered her Pacific Colonies, and Klaustaffen Island was handed over to Japan under a League of Nations Mandate. A Japanese businessman immediately surveyed the island, discovered that the enormous basalt plug was riddled with huge caves and miles of vents and channels, and decided that it would make a lucrative South China Sea coaling station, when warships still depended on coal as fuel. He set to work with hundreds of labourers and explosives, enlarging the entrance of an existing massive cave in the cliff face on the Northern side of the island to turn it into a subterranean harbour capable of docking and loading coal lighters and barges. Sadly, by the time the coaling station and the accommodation for the expected workers was completed and ready to welcome its first ship, the Imperial Navy had largely re-equipped with oil fired vessels, the businessman went bankrupt and the island was abandoned again without ever fuelling a ship in anger and was soon forgotten. We have the civil engineers drawings for the layout of the coaling station, I'll send them over to Mr Load after...".

"Got them, thank you!", Wade's voice momentarily interjected over the speakers, causing Kim another momentary inward grin.

"Fine," said Dr Director curtly, and then resumed the briefing. "In 1941, the Australians dropped an observer with a short wave radio on the island by submarine, with the intention that he report on Japanese shipping movements in the South China Sea. In fact, not a single Japanese ship was sighted from the island during the remaining years of the war, but the bored observer filled his time exploring the island, the cave system and the coaling station. He was resupplied every six months by a Royal Australian Navy submarine, and in fact as a result of his exploration, they began using the abandoned coaling station as a submarine pen during their visits instead of ferrying supplies ashore in rubber boats. The observer drew sketch maps of the layout of the subterranean tunnel and cave network on the island during his time there, which I'm sure Mr Load already now has," she quickly pre-empted,"and at the end of the Second World War, with the defeat of Japan, the island was passed, fairly arbitrarily, into British administration, possibly because of its location, in between what was then Malaya and Hong Kong. In the 1950's, Great Britain was looking for a site to conduct nuclear tests, and surveyed Klaustaffen Island before selecting Christmas Island for its H-bomb tests. But before the signing of the US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement in 1958, the UK had plans for Klaustaffen island.

"In 1956 they landed over 2,000 Royal Engineers and Pioneer Corps troops on the island, who among other things blasted out the old coaling station entrance and the floor of the cave to allow it to take large cargo vessels, and cut several new miles of deep rock tunnel on the island, to accomodate a garrison, scientists and an assembly plant. We have no detailed plans for these works, mainly because Great Britain denied and has continued to officially deny that they were ever on the island, let alone planned to conduct a weapons test there. However, strictly deniable unofficial briefings from MI6, and the conclusions we have drawn from piecing together and analysing intelligence information from China, is that if America had not already been convinced of the mutual benefits of sharing its nuclear weapons technology with the British by the Christmas Island H-bomb tests, it was intended to detonate an extremely high-yield thermonuclear device on Klaustaffen island as a 'spectacular' demonstration, in order to provide the final impetus to the negotiations. Our analysts believe that preparations for the test were all but complete, although only a handful of those involved knew that that was what they had prepared for, and that an enormous thermonuclear device had been assembled in-situ. At that point the treaty was signed and rendered the project, which had no useful military application due to its impracticable size and weight, redundant. "Our analysts have deduced from the available intelligence that this device may have been as powerful as one hundred megatons in yield, which would have made it by far the largest thermonuclear device ever detonated before or since. Immediately the treaty had been signed, all work on the test was halted and instead a very deep vertical shaft was bored from within the island, we have estimated to a depth of at least two miles. Our conclusion is that the assembled weapon was far too big and far too dangerous to be transported back to the UK, so in clear breach of international law and of several retrospective environmental treaties since signed, it was instead taken down into the bowels of the earth, dismantled, and encased in lead. The shaft was then backfilled with many hundreds of millions of tonnes of reinforced ferro-concrete mixed on site using crushed rock spoil, to create a steel reinforced plug at least a mile and a half thick. Once the British were convinced that the nuclear material had been safely and indefinitely secured, they painstakingly removed all machinery, equipment and trace of their presence beyond the bare tunnel and cave network, and then withdrew, abandoning Klaustaffen Island entirely. We know that Britain has maintained remote seismic monitoring of the lower reaches of the shaft to detect any attempt to reach the dismantled weapon, and has secretly conducted five-yearly on-site inspections on the island to ascertain that the concrete plug remains undisturbed. For reasons that shall become clear, that has not been an easy task over the last forty years. Our analysts are convinced that this fissile material has remained entirely secure, that an attempt to recover it would be detected and interdicted years before it could be completed, and that it would in any case not be technically feasible. Furthermore we believe that nobody still alive outside the highest echelons of the British security apparatus knows that the material is even there, or how it was stored, and that only ourselves and the Chinese Secret Intelligence Service even suspect that it might be there. However, it is as a result of this rather unpleasant legacy, and the fact that neither nation would wish to be held legally responsible for the immense costs and risks involved in even attempting to properly clean the island up by removing this material, that it has acquired a unique status amongst the islands of the South China Sea; it's an island that nobody claims sovereignty and jurisdiction over!

"Every other island and island chain in the South China Sea, is disputed territory. Here...", the graphical display pulled back to show the entire South China Sea, with a small cluster of dots in the middle surrounded by a red ring, "..are the Spratly islands, about 150 tiny rocks poking out of the sea, claimed, and occupied, variously by China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines. And here...", another red ring appeared, "...the Scarborough Shoal, occupied and claimed by the Philippines, also claimed by China and Taiwan. Pratas Island, claimed by China, occupied and garrisoned by Taiwan. I could go on, but you will take the point that every rock, reef and sandbank in the South China Sea is the subject of competing sovereignty claims, except Klaustaffen Island. Everybody in the region has agreed for forty years that it is the sovereign territory of either the UK or of China, and both those protagonists have insisted that it definitely belongs to the other. In addition, neither country is prepared to do anything that might be seen to assert any sovereignty over the island. And that includes law enforcement!".

"Wow! An island with no law! That sounds like a great place for a lair!" said Kim, thinking aloud.

"Indeed", said Dr Director, "but the sitting tenant has never allowed it. While the island is beyond the reach of conventional law, nowhere is outside the jurisdiction of Global Justice!".

"Sitting tenant?" asked Kim, fascinated. Betty Director continued "In 1961, this man..."; the screen switched from the map to a grainy black and white police mug shot of a swarthy, heavily tattooed Asian man; "...Sudo Hamasaki, a career gangster from a long line of career gangsters, and more commonly known as Lo Pin, was Kumicho of a small Yakuza syndicate which lost a short but bloody turf war in the Tokyo underworld. He was forced to flee Japan for his life with the tattered remnants of his gang. They escaped by fishing boat, intending to head for Korea to regroup and rebuild, then return to reclaim their territory. Instead the fishing boat he escaped aboard was forced to turn and run easterly from a Typhoon and it was by pure chance that the boat came upon Klaustaffen Island and the Captain took shelter in the abandoned subterranean harbour. "Never one to pass up an opportunity, by the time Lo Pin had explored the abandoned cave complex; he had decided that piracy and smuggling would be a much better business than revenge and that this would be an ideal clandestine base for such an operation. When he realised that the island was in practice beyond the reach of any law, he no longer bothered to conceal his island base, de-facto renaming it 'Lo-Pin's Island'.

From his new safe haven, over the next three decades, Lo-Pin became the scourge of the South China sea. In addition to almost industrial scale piracy, capturing ships and stealing valuable cargoes to sell, often back to the vessel's insurers, he also ran successful smuggling and slavery rackets from the island. "On the high seas, his pirates almost always came off worst in encounters with naval vessels from any of the many nations whose shipping he preyed on, but the vast expanses of the South China Sea and the many territorial boundaries that hampered pursuits, ensured that the very most those who hoped to eliminate the threat of Lo Pin could hope to achieve was containment. In addition, Lo Pin was careful not to become so greedy that he forced anybody's hand and provoked any of the regional powers into a full on military assault on his island. Meanwhile, funded by enormous criminal profits, Lo Pin continued to develop his island fortress, garrisoning it with an army of mercenary bodyguards against either an assassination attempt or an attack from a jealous and greedy rival. In 1972, as a consequence of business dealings with the Hong Kong triads, he acquired a chinese born wife, who soon after bore him a son.

Loong Hamasaki was sent first to China and then to Japan to be schooled and groomed to one day assume control of the family businesses, under various assumed identities. "Loong shared his father's opportunism, ambition and physical presence, but also his mother's superior intellect. In addition to the best education that money could buy in China, Hong Kong, Japan & Korea, at which he excelled, he studied traditional martial arts from the age of three. He developed a fascination with and an enthusiasm for different systems of combat, with a bias towards traditional forms and styles, and became an accomplished martial artist, with black belts at 2nd Dan in Tae Kwon Do, and classical Jujitsu, and a third degree black sash in Hung Gar Kung Fu. By 1995, he had earned first class degrees in Marine Engineering and Political Science, and a Masters in Business Administration, and he had joined the family firm, responsible for negotiating on his father's behalf with the world's marine insurers for options on the return of pirated vessels and cargoes. "It was while Loong Hamasaki was visiting Lo Pin's island on business in 1995 that his father's luck ran out. Early in 1995, Lo Pin's raiders had hijacked a freighter that unknown to them was carrying a hundred million US dollars' worth of Triad cocaine and guns hidden amongst its cargo. Previously whenever something similar had happened, Lo Pin had always quietly returned the illicit cargo to its owners for a token finder's fee, in the interests of self-preservation. On this occasion, though, a Royal Navy helicopter happened to overfly the ship as it was being boarded, and its parent warship quickly overhauled and captured the ship. A later search found the contraband; Triad leaders blamed Lo-Pin for drawing attention to the vessel and put out a very large contract on his life. A small hit team landed on the Southern end of the island, evaded the bodyguards and we gather, used silenced weapons to shoot Lo-Pin, his wife, a butler and several kitchen staff dead as they ate dinner. Loong Hamasaki walked into the room during the hit, and tackled the assassins unarmed. He was shot and seriously wounded for his trouble but succeeded in raising the alarm and the assassins were belatedly killed by the bodyguards. Loong was treated on the island in a fully equipped intensive care unit, and as far as we know, recovered well from his injuries, but he was obviously deeply affected by what happened. He has not left the island since that day. He took over his father's nom de guerre along with his empire, also becoming known as Lo Pin. We have taken to calling him Lo Pin Junior to distinguish him from his father. Although he has absolutely no aversion to using the latest technology, he gained an intense phobia of firearms after being shot, banning them from the island on principle and declaring that the sentence for anybody bringing one to the island for any reason would be death. He has replaced guns with training in traditional martial arts and traditional ranged weapons such as longbows and crossbows. He established a 'martial arts academy' on the island, which apparently accommodates up to 800 students, and has been training his own people and selected students drawn from around the region ever since. We have only limited information concerning the works carried out within the island between 1961 and today, although we do know that there was no shortage of money to fund the project, and that Loong has made substantial further changes since he inherited the island. Mr Load no doubt already has what intelligence we do have in front of him, most of it derived from invoices for materials and equipment. However, externally we have satellite imagery which shows that since 1995 the southern plateau...", as the screen on the wall showed the island once again, and then rotated it to show the flat sandy area at its southern end, "...is now protected by underwater obstacles as shown, a laser grid, deep hidden man traps at the locations indicated, and several layers of razor wire. Detailed analysis is already with Mr Load, I'm sure!". Dr Director paused and deliberately took a sip of water from a glass on her desk, as if to deliberately punctuate the briefing. "OK, The Situation!", she continued. "Since Loong took over the family business, the volume and impact of piracy directed from Lo Pin's island has dramatically reduced. It is believed that the slavery operation has been more or less wound up entirely, and a much lower volume of drugs is being smuggled annually. Most regional powers have revised downwards their assessment of the threat to trade and social order that Lo Pin represents over the last decade. Lo Pin, meanwhile, has been successfully diversifying through proxies into legitimate global shipping, industrial and technology businesses. Lo Pin is not, and never has been on the Y-List, and is not therefore any concern of Global Justice. However, his not entirely unreasonable paranoia has generated a difficult situation, which both China & the United Kingdom - who are both signatories and members in good standing of the Wolsberg Concordat, have prevailed upon Global Justice to help them resolve. "When Great Britain abandoned Klaustaffen island in 1959, they intended that their 5 yearly inspections would consist of nothing more than an agent from the Honk Kong station of MI6 landing by helicopter with a clip board and having a quick look around to ensure that the concrete filled shaft was undisturbed. Instead, with Lo Pin in residence, the 1964 inspection was conducted by a covert reconnaissance team from the Special Boat Squadron who were inserted and extracted by a Royal Navy submarine. The same inspection mission was repeated every five years until 1994 without detection, incident or casualties. The teams swam ashore pre-dawn, infiltrated the lower levels of the island cave system, confirmed that no major civil engineering works were in progress, and then exfiltrated just before first light.

"By 1999, Lo Pin Junior had significantly upgraded security on and around the island after the assassination of his parents, making the inspection mission far more challenging. Nevertheless, the operation followed the usual pattern until the exfiltration phase, when the team were compromised. One SBS man was wounded by a crossbow bolt, a guard was shot dead and the team successfully exfiltrated, with the wounded man, before the body was discovered. "The discovery that unknown infiltrators had bought guns on to his island and killed one of his men so enraged Lo Pin Junior that he upgraded security again and massively so. The British were able to determine that part of this security upgrade included surrounding the island with active and passive sonar systems and a network of hydrophones, precluding future short-range submarine insertions. In 2004 the SBS inspection team was therefore inserted by canoe from a range of 60 miles. They are believed to have landed on the island successfully, but they then vanished, and are now presumed dead. "Obviously the British have the resources to put a team ashore against any opposition that Lo Pin can offer, but that would conflict with the diplomatic objective of not acknowledging any sovereign responsibility for the island. The Chinese also could occupy the island, but decline to get involved for the same reason. The British are also concerned that a further failed covert insertion attempt might prompt Lo Pin Junior to start asking questions that nobody has so far asked. "Neither the British nor the Chinese have any evidence that Lo Pin has done any excavation of the shaft. Satellite surveillance suggests that no significant quantity of spoil has been removed since the last inspection, and remote seismic surveys detect no deep tunnelling. However, there has been no internal inspection of the island for eight years now, and both the British and the Chinese have become twitchy. "Both countries have asked Global Justice for assistance, on the grounds that they would like us to sweep the island for Y-list entities, and oh, while we are there, could we just make sure that the caverns inside the mountain are not filled with several million tonnes of concrete chippings and let them know. Up until this point I have refused their requests - I am very keen to avoid Global Justice suffering from mission creep, and we don't exist to solve the non-Y-list related diplomatic problems of Concordat member states, especially at high risk to our own assets. However, your unexpected invitation to Lo Pin's tournament has presented us with a priceless opportunity to carry out this mission at absolutely minimal risk. "For the last 9 years, ever since Lo Pin first established his Martial Arts academy, he has organised a summer invitational martial-arts tournament on the island. Each year a small number of highly respected invitees have been taken from Hong Kong to Lo Pin's island by luxury junk, and have enjoyed lavish hospitality there for the duration of a martial arts tournament, competing against each other and students of Lo Pin's academy, with significant prize money available. At the end of the tournament they have been returned safely to Hong Kong, again by luxury junk. Unfortunately, neither British nor Chinese intelligence have ever managed to engineer an invitation for one of their agents. This year, for the tenth anniversary of the competition, Lo Pin seems to be organising a tournament on a much larger scale, and seems to have invited the best of the best from all over the world to participate. Including you!".

Betty Director paused again, and took another strategic sip of water, while Kim's mind was already racing ahead, imagining her evading, or possibly even fighting off, armies of highly trained guards and dodging volleys of arrows in order to inspect the concrete plug.

"Your Mission...", said Dr Director, dragging Kim's mind back to the here and now, "...is to accept Lo Pin's invitation, enter his tournament, explore the interior of Lo Pin island as fully as possible but only within the constraints Lo Pin imposes on his guests, and then return here for de-briefing." Kim's jaw dropped open. "Your Mission...", said Dr Director, for a second time as is traditional in mission briefings, "...is to accept Lo Pin's invitation, enter his tournament, explore the interior of Lo Pin island as fully as possible but only within the constraints Lo Pin imposes on his guests, and then return here for de-briefing."

Kim was still reeling, somewhat shocked. "B-B... is that all? Don't you need me to.. um... do anything while I'm there?"

"Absolutely not, Kim! This mission has only been authorised at all on grounds of its extremely low risk. Were you to do anything that might arouse any suspicion whatsoever, it would raise the risk factor of the operation significantly. And in any case, it is unnecessary. MI6 knows that the plug was intact at the last inspection, they know approximately the amount of rock waste that has been removed by sea from within the main basalt feature, and they know that in order for anyone to tunnel down to the fissile material without removing vast quantities of rock or concrete spoil they would need to almost entirely fill all the known galleries inside the island with rock spoil. If we can report that there is plenty of empty space, then they can confirm it hasn't happened. And in any case, your official sanctioned Global Justice mission is merely to observe and later report any activity that may relate to the 'Y' list during your stay. Anything else is merely a passing courtesy to members of the Concordat. Even that passing courtesy has had to be explicitly permitted by all the other member nations of the Concordat. Lo Pin is not our problem and we do not wish to make him our problem!"

"So, after all that political intrigue and the history lesson... I'm pretty much looking at a fortnight's luxury resort holiday with a little added Kung-Fu?" asked Kim?.

"That's not quite how I would have put it, Kim, but it is true that if this mission goes as planned, it should not be an unpleasant experience at all. But I don't believe in deploying people in the field without a thorough understanding of the background to their mission, wherever possible. Especially a mission with so many political issues surrounding it. However, we also endeavour to prepare for all eventualities, even the unlikely ones, so if I may proceed...". The glass of water yielded another sip, as Kim centred herself and waited for her to continue. "So, execution: With your invitation, Lo Pin

Junior also generously provided a First Class return air ticket, Middleton to Hong Kong via LAX, for a scheduled flight departing at twenty hundred hours Sierra... err... sorry, that's 8pm... tomorrow, returning to Middleton in a little over two and a half weeks' time. There is also a premium suite already booked and paid for in your name at the airport hotel", she added, as a hotel website appeared on the big screen. "As you can see, Lo Pin clearly really wants you to attend his tournament. From what we have discovered, he has offered different but equally persuasive inducements to many of his other invitees." Kim was warming ever further to this 'mission'. She was well used to travelling on crates in the hold of cargo aircraft, second seat in military jets,

and even, once in a while, in the leg-room free zone of airline economy class, but she had never yet travelled first class on a commercial flight. A luxury hotel suite, even for one night, with... she looked at the glass and marble palace depicted on the screen... a full service health spa? If only all missions could be this way!

"From the hotel, the next morning at eleven hundred hours Mike, you will take a pre-booked taxi to a reception centre at Hoi-Sin Wharf, Kowloon side, where you will board a junk that will take you to Lo Pin's island. After that, it's up to you!", said Dr Director, expansively.

"I think I'll cope...",, said Kim, trying to hide her growing glee. Lo Pin might not be model citizen of the year, but she really didn't mind a few days of pampering at his expense, in the guilt free service of Global Justice. The chance to test her skills against the best of the best, without anybody actually trying to kill or maim her, was nearly as attractive. And perhaps, though her inner voice only dared whisper it to herself, she could use the time away on her own to try and get her head around... stuff... Dr Director took another sip of water, and then continued. "OK, Administration. It goes without saying that as far as Lo Pin is concerned, you have accepted his invitation, and your acceptance has nothing to do with Global Justice whatsoever. Therefore, all the arrangements for your trip are entirely as made between you and Lo Pin. This bag...", as Dr Director held up a ziploc bag, "...contains everything he has sent you, air tickets, itinerary and invitation, hotel brochure and booking reference, all treated to remove any forensic traces of our handling of them - that's a standard precaution. Please dispose of that bag before you leave Middleton".

"OK...",, said Kim seriously, inwardly grinning at all the overblown Mission Impossible spy hooplah surrounding what was looking more and more like a dream solo holiday. "We will be monitoring you covertly until you leave Hong Kong. After that point you are on your own until you return to Hong Kong, I'm afraid...", said Dr Director apologetically. "No big! And anyway, I've always got Wade!" said Kim, cheerfully, holding up her Kimmunicator. "Ah, yes. I'll come back to that...",, said Dr Director, unsettling Kim slightly. "First, though, I will say that we will have an emergency extraction plan available, in the very unlikely event that we need to pull you out of the operation for some reason".

"Pull me out?", asked Kim, startled.

"Just a precaution, I assure you", soothed Dr Director. "But all things being equal, I will see you back here a couple of days after you get home for a mission debrief".

Kim relaxed again slightly, as Dr Director took another sip from her water glass. Kim found herself wondering whether it was a deliberate affectation or not, and decided that it probably was.

"Command: I'm well aware that you aren't one of my agents, Kim, and that is partly why I've given you as much background information as I have. Nominally this is a Global Justice mission, and I have taken personal command of it, because of its sensitivity. In practice, you are going to be entirely autonomous, and you've never taken orders from Global Justice well anyway". She grinned icily. "But I wanted you to understand the momentous consequences that might follow if you were tempted to re-write the script mid-mission and try to save the world on your own. So please, don't look for trouble, and don't get too creative. OK?", she smiled expectantly. Kim was mildly indignant at the implied criticism, but decided to let it slide. "No big!", she responded, cheerily, whilst resisting the entirely childish urge to poke her tongue out at Betty Director. As Dr Director took another sip of water, Kim decided that it was definitely an affectation, and idly wondered why the older woman did it.

"Finally, communication: I'm afraid that in addition to the absolute prohibition on firearms, Lo Pin does not allow his guests to bring any electronic devices with them to his island. We believe that this is a security measure, and it is enforced - visitors are rigorously scanned as they land on the island, and in previous years, tournament competitors and their luggage have been scanned before embarkation in Hong Kong. I'm afraid that your Kimunicator would certainly be detected, and you would be required to leave it behind. So... no Kimunicator, I'm afraid, and no laser lipstick either!"

Kim frowned, "Wade?". Wade blinked into vision on the big screen. "I'm afraid she is right, Kim. I've pulled up and cross referenced a list of all Lo Pins electronic equipment purchases for the last ten years, and if he has built the scanners I think he might have, you couldn't get even a single transistor past them without so much shielding you'd need a low loader to move it.", confirmed the ten year old super-genius.

"Can you get the Kimunicator on to the boat, Wade?", asked Kim, thoughtfully. "I could, Kim, but if you are scanned when you land, that won't help. Also, with the amount of componentry Lo Pin has bought, I can't guarantee that the vessel itself won't be scanned, if it isn't rigged with internal detectors, that is. I think the only way to do this is to get the Kimunicator to you on the island, the rock makes scanning the entire island impossible".

"You can do that?", asked Kim, not nearly as surprised as she would have been if she didn't know how brilliant Wade actually was. "I have a few ideas, yes. Leave it with me!", said Wade, impassive as ever. "As always, you rock, Wade!", declared Kim.

"Well, if you can do that, Mr Load, it will certainly simplify things greatly!", agreed Dr Director. "I'll talk to you as soon as I have something, Kim!" said Wade. "Please and Thank you!", responded

Kim, as Wade imploded to a white dot on the screen, and was replaced again by the Global Justice logo.

"Well, that concludes the briefing, Kim. Any questions?", asked Dr Director. Kim wracked her brains for a moment, and then relaxed. "Nope! I think I've got it covered!", she said, cheerily. "Unless you have any tips for a good choice of spa treat... ment", as the sentence suddenly caught in her throat. She had tried to think about spa treatment and for no reason at all, she had suddenly pictured Shego, slices of cucumber over her eyes and a mud facial, towel round her hair and a robe. It seemed to have been one of her more incongruous indulgences, in between acts of outrageous larceny. But why that mental image? Why now? Why the sudden rush of... grief? Were the Chinese walls in her mind cracking under the pressure? How much longer would they hold before she ended up a blubbering mess on the floor? Well, she was Kim Possible. She could do anything, and that included staring down the Director of Global Justice Operations across her own desk. And right then and there, she decided to reduce the mental pressure a bit...


	12. Growing Pains

There was a momentary uncomfortable pause, as Kim looked at the floor, and then she looked up and met Dr Director's eye with a rather forced cheerful grin, not that Betty Director noticed. "There is one thing; have you managed to make your office Wade proof yet?". Betty Director looked slightly askance at the apparently random question, and then decided to humour Kim. "Yes. A push of this button isolates this room from all external connections, completes a faraday cage and activates audio dampers. Why do you ask?". "I was wondering if you could demonstrate, I'm sure Wade will appreciate the challenge", suggested Kim. Dr Director's eyes narrowed at Kim's rather odd request, but as her face remoulded itself into the puppy dog pout, Dr Director knew she was beaten. Perhaps this was what kept teenagers amused these days?

"OK...", she said, and theatrically pushed the button. There was a loud 'klunk' and the emergency lighting tripped to replace the main lighting, the power connections severed by big solenoids to protect against even the most unlikely routes for electronic eavesdropping. Betty pointed at the now dead big screen, then theatrically tapped lifeless buttons on her desktop telephone. Finally, she called out "Mr Load... can you hear me! Yoohoo! Mr Load... are you listening?". Predictably there was no response. "So, as you can see...", she said smugly, turning back to Kim, "this room is now ent...". Her voice tailed off, and she froze, as an involuntary shiver shot up her spine. Kim was no longer looking cheerful. In fact she had a very serious expression on her face indeed, and she had Dr Director fixed with a fearsome stare. There was a silence in the room so thick that you could have skated on it, and it seemed like it went on for days rather than the few seconds it lasted in reality. Dr Director was just casting around in her mind for a way to end it when Kim spoke.

"How long have I been on the Y-list?", she asked in a low but even tone.

Betty Director was caught completely off guard. She had known that there was a risk of Kim putting two and two together eventually, when she had realised yesterday that Kim would find out about the Y-list one way or another. But she hadn't expected her to put it together overnight, or to ambush her with it! She struggled to regroup, as Kim's laser green eyes continued to bore holes into her face. Honesty was the only policy, she realised - a lie now would unravel later. "Errm... just over two years, Kim", she replied, trying to sound matter-of-fact.

"Why?", shot back Kim, maintaining the same tone, stare as unwavering as it was unnerving.

"To protect you...", said Dr Director, uncomfortably.

"From?", was the even riposte, eyes still drilling into her skull.

"From harm, from retaliation, from...".

"And?".

Betty was used to making others feel uncomfortable, it was what she did. What she had done for some years now. This reminded her of being up before the headmistress at boarding school, which must have been the last time she had been put this far onto her back foot. What was worse at this precise moment was that she didn't know how to answer the question.

"You wanted to protect me from reality, from the worst of human depravity, from the things you thought I wouldn't be able to handle?", asked Kim, tone still even, stare still unwavering.

"Kim, you were 14 years old, just heading for 15. There were things that we, I, just didn't feel it right to expose a teenage girl to", she answered defensively, but nonetheless grateful for the life preserver Kim had thrown her.

"And why did you feel it right to recruit Wade to help you do that?", asked Kim, her tone suddenly turning icy and her eyes blazing.

Betty Director's good eye betrayed her, a momentarily hunted look crossing her face as she struggled with an accusation that she had no answer for. Her lips moved and a sound came out, but nothing intelligible.

Kim resumed her low tone as she partly rescued Dr Director from her discomfiture. "I saw something last night, something that gave me great pause for thought. So much so that I didn't sleep. I asked myself why, when there was so much real evil in the world, I wasn't fighting it. And why I had never noticed before. Why am I dealing with idiots who want to cover Wisconsin with melted cheese, when I could have been searching the Tora Bora caves for Osama Bin Laden or facing off warlords in Darfur. And the only thing I could come up with was the Y-list. That's why I so rarely get hits on my website from governments or law enforcement agencies. Last year when they had that serial rapist on the Upperton college campus, and I called the police to volunteer my services? The panic from the Captain and the way they said 'No' should have told me there was something odd going on. There were three more victims before he was caught, three more than there needed to be, because of you 'protecting' me!".

Dr Director was happy to listen, because it relieved the pressure on her to talk, but she was still fixed like a rabbit in car headlights, by that brain-freezing stare.

"But that's only the governments and law enforcement you had taken care of. It didn't explain why I have never had hits from parents wanting somebody to rescue their kidnapped children from guerillas, or their daughters from drugs and prostitution. The only thing that could explain that was if you were filtering what reached my site, or at least what reached me. And the only way you could have got away with that for two years was with the active assistance of Wade".

"Don't judge him, Kim, he...", started Betty Director, anxious to regain the initiative.

"Oh I don't blame Wade. I trust him with my life, I have done many times, I know he is a true and loyal friend. But he was eight years old when you and your people must have got got to him, to convince him that if I had to deal with the worst of reality, it might hurt me. And he wouldn't ever want to hurt me. He might have the intellect of a nobel prizewinner, but he was still an eight year old little boy. Until you made him the gatekeeper to my health and future well being!".

Dr Director had an uncomfortable feeling that Kim might have a point.

"So, let me show you what I saw last night. You really need to see this, anyway. It's a good example of exactly what you have had Wade protecting me from. Tell me what you think."

Kim pointed the Kimmunicator at the white board on Dr Director's office wall and placed it on the desk.

"Remember you said I didn't need to know what happened to Shego in Uzbekistan? Well, Wade decided that he would do some research, just in case I changed my mind. He's so helpful like that, it's as if he reads my mind sometimes. He found some things that you didn't. This little film covers what happened inside the basement of the Tarqand interior ministry building..."

The only way Kim could do this was to turn her back on the whiteboard and concentrate unwaveringly on Betty Director's face while the video played in front of her. Thus she was able to see the hard bitten, cynical, combat veteran director of Global Justice flinch almost imperceptibly when she first realised that it was a human body being skinned, and then turn as white as a sheet a few seconds later when the 'corpse' opened its eyes. The screaming on the soundtrack almost pushed Kim into tearing up herself, and her stomach churned a little, but by sheer force of will, and by focussing intently on the face in front of her, she held it together. If she hadn't had the soundtrack to guide her, she would have been able to track the progress of the video pretty accurately, merely by interpreting Dr Director's facial expressions. There was a slight curl of the lip as the torturers were swapping barbaric jokes, a slight snort when the light relief said "There is something inhuman coming", shocked surprise as Shego arrived and vapourised the first guard, rapt attention as she fought her way through the dungeon, a cringe of anticipation as she first advanced on the cowering torturers, and then first surprise, then successive winces as she chose not to incinerate the lot of them but instead got on with methodically crippling them. But Dr Director's expression when Shego said "There are some people out there who deserve the chance to show you how they feel about you!" was particularly priceless. Her good eye looked as if it was about to pop out of its socket and her mouth described a perfect circle as she watched, utterly shocked. And then she stayed frozen in that pose, immobile, until Kim heard a bloodcurdling scream that she hadn't heard the previous night - she had obviously let the film run on further than she had when she was watching it, and as the scream sounded, Betty Director shut her eye and snapped her face away from the wall with an audible "Eugh!". Kim quickly killed the video, and pocketed the Kimunicator, as Dr Director tried to re-compose herself.

"Well?", asked Kim. Dr Director didn't know what to say. Part of her mind was brimming with questions, and part with answers to questions she hadn't asked. The analysts would have a field day with what had happened in that dungeon, she was sure. Although with Shego all but confirmed dead, perhaps they might not be quite as eager to look at it as they once would have been. As for what she thought about it, she really wasn't sure. But one thought that did pop into her head and out of her mouth before she had a chance to think about it properly was "Wade shouldn't have let you see that video, Kim".

It was exactly the wrong thing to say, from Kim's perspective. A flash of pure red-headed rage took her for a second and she leapt to her feet, planted her fists into the top top of Dr Directors oak desk hard enough to leave small indentations and thrust herself across the desk towards Betty Director, who in spite of herself shrank back from the clearly enraged Kim. "I don't give a FUCK what Wade should have done to look after me! Who was looking after Wade?", she spat.

And then a moment later she regretted it. She, Kim Possible, had just sworn like a sailor. She just didn't do that. Even on the occasions when she had found herself facing insurmountable odds, with death seemingly imminent, she had never let found the need to use cuss words. She was quite surprised she even knew any! Dr Director was in shock as well. Had Kim Possible really just yelled "FUCK"? That was like the Barney the Dinosaur opening a Meth lab, or the Pope starring in an internet sex tape!

"I'm sorry...", said Kim, as she slumped back into her chair, before Dr Director could think of anything to say, useful or otherwise. "You thought maybe I couldn't handle stuff like that", she said, jerking her thumb behind her at the now blank whiteboard. "You were right. I threw up. A lot. I'm not even old enough to see movies in the cinema where actors pretend to do half those things yet. I didn't sleep last night because every time I closed my eyes I kept seeing that poor woman...", Kim's voice wavered for a moment, and she paused before continuing. "But that's the real world, not the kind of fake Disnefied bubble you have built around me!".

Dr Director opened her mouth to speak, but then closed it again as she thought better of whatever she was going to say. Kim filled the void. "And while you were wrapping me in cotton wool, you were putting the weight of keeping my moral compass safe on the shoulders of a precocious little boy. And you did such a good job of it that at 8 years old he diligently took it upon himself to look into every cesspool of iniquity and unspeakable horror he could find in the world, just so I wouldn't ever have to. You thought I would have problems if I saw the kind of things I saw in that video. Well, how do you think the ten year old child who created it is going to be doing?".

Doctor Director's face fell like a rock, and her mouth dropped open. "No... Wade?", she mouthed, in

some distress. Her good eye teared up as Kim watched, and she realised that whatever Global Justice had done to Wade, Dr Director at least hadn't intended it to happen. "We... we just asked him to help us put a filter into your website to keep... we had to convince... I never... we.. ", she rambled, an expression of mounting horror on her face.

"I know Wade. That video is some of his best work. He found the individual security videos yesterday in the Uzbek interior ministry secure library, just being helpful in case I wanted to know more about what happened to Shego there. He watched them, and decided they were too confusing to follow easily, so he cut them all together into a single, brilliantly edited Hollywood Oscar standard feature, complete with English subtitles, probably while doing three other incredible things at once. The blood and gore? Didn't even bother him", said Kim. "That's not normal. He never seems to sleep. Not normal. Wild horses wouldn't drag him away from his keyboards, and the only thing that has got him outside the house in the last two years was when somebody fried his computers. So not normal!", Kim continued. "Wade is ten years old, he's totally desensitised to horrific images, he's a chronic insomniac with severe OCD and moderate agoraphobia. And you did all that and more to Wade to save a cheerleader who saves the world from having a few nightmares?"

"We... I... just wanted to stop you turning out like Shego did, Kim!", said Dr Director, voice cracking. A solitary tear ran down Betty Director's cheek, and seeing it, Kim softened her tone just slightly.

"As I think that video proves, there are worse things in the world than turning out like Shego did. Like skinning people alive. Or...", said Kim, aiming a final verbal switchblade between Betty Director's ribs, "...like destroying the innocence and mental well being of a child!".

Betty Director looked utterly destroyed as she sat opposite Kim, and yet Kim felt a thousand times better than she had since she had first seen that video. Catharsis had done her the world of good. "So anyway", she said, her tone suddenly relaxed and cheerful again, "when I get back from this mission, we need to have a serious talk about what it's OK for you to protect me from and what's it's not OK to protect me from. I'm totally grateful to you for stopping the anthrax and the mail bombs, and especially the junk mail. Some of the other stuff? Not so much".

Dr Director nodded glumly, although she was clearly recovering her composure. The analysis department were going to choke when she fed them the edited highlights of what had just happened. This was going to trigger a complete ground up re-work of Kim's profile and lead to hundreds of hours of work and of supercomputer time, and until it was done, she was playing things entirely by ear.

"And that's the other thing. While I'm gone, you need to pull in the very best team of psychiatrists Global Justice can find, and get them on Wade's case. You owe him that and more. And I owe him to make sure that you pay the debt. Agreed?"

"Agreed!", said Dr Director, sounding like herself again. "You know, we can scrub this mission if you like, it isn't that important...".

"No way!", said Kim. "I'm Kim Possible. This is what I do. Including the spa treatments!".

Betty Director would much rather that Kim didn't take the mission. Until she could get Kim's profile updated and have it computed against the mission parameters, she didn't have any scientific way of predicting how Kim might react in various situations. I mean, Kim was still Kim, so she wasn't going to shack up with Lo Pin and start digging for nuclear bomb parts, but on the other hand, the Kim she had known would never have allowed the word 'fuck' to pass her lips, especially not yelled in blazing anger. And yet, Kim wasn't a Global Justice agent, didn't look in a mood to take no for an answer, and more pertinently, she was holding the bag containing the tickets and invitation in her hand, so Dr Director had no acceptable means of stopping her. She bowed to the inevitable...

"OK, Kim. We'll have that discussion when you get back, after the mission debrief, and I'll set the wheels in motion for getting Mr Load the help he needs. I hope you understand that we have always tried to act in your best interests, Kim, and I apologise if we haven't always succeeded. And as for Mr Load... I... it never crossed my mind. Even yesterday, when I said didn't want him knowing about what happened, it never crossed my mind that he... I'm sorry, OK? We just weren't looking at him the way we look at you!"

"Yes, I know...", sighed Kim. "You act like you always know best what is good for other people. Is this what happens when you are wrong?".

Dr Director chose not to answer that, changing the subject. "Can I have a copy of that video, Kim? For our analysts?".

Kim shook her head. "Sorry, no can do. I'm going to delete it, because something that vile doesn't need to exist. Have your people call me later, and I'll tell them exactly where Wade found the original video archive, and they can hack in and get their own copy of the raw footage. I don't want Wade to have to have anything more to do with this".

Dr Director understood, and nodded. "Well, OK Kim... good luck, then!", she said, lamely.

"Thank you!", Kim said sweetly, as if the previous half hour and more of anger and angst had never happened. "You.. err.. may want to fix your face, by the way".

Dr Director didn't wear make-up as a rule. Which was a good thing, because it would currently be smeared all down her face if she did. She pulled a tissue out of the box secreted in her bottom desk drawer and gave her face and her good eye a good going over to remove any trace of dampness, and then looked at Kim again expectantly.

"That's better! Seeya!", said Kim cheerily, hand on the door handle, waiting for Betty Director to unlock the door. Dr Director lifted a flap on her desk and pushed a button, eliciting a loud clunk as main power was reconnected and the big screen sprang back into life. Just as she was pushing the door release, the phone started ringing. No rest for the wicked. She looked up, and Kim was already halfway out the door with a cheery wave behind her. She barely had time to raise her own hand before the door had closed. She sighed and picked up the phone. "Dr Director!".

"Hi.. err.. it's Mike Jones, down in Particle Physics Laboratory 3. You.. uh.. asked for an immediate update if we made any progress with the investigation you asked us to carry out into the unconfirmed death of a Y-list entity? I've been trying to reach you for the last half an hour". Dr Director sat bolt upright in her chair, and said "I was in conference. Can you confirm that Shego is dead?". "No... not yet. We still think that is the overwhelming probability, but there are some significant... anomolies...", responded Mike Jones, apologetically.

That would just about put the lid on today. Even the remote prospect of the Shego she had seen on her wall today venting her anger at the CIA didn't bear much thinking about. She had damned well better be dead! "My office, 5 minutes!", she barked, and slammed the phone down.


	13. Do not go gentle into that good night

Mike Jones sat perched uncomfortably on the edge of his chair, across the desk from an extremely stern looking woman wearing an eye patch. He had previously only seen a couple of photographs of the Director of Operations, courtesy of the 'orientation pack' he was handed when he rrived, and of course now he had spoken to her on the phone, but he had never met her in the flesh, nor experienced the icy gaze of that one good eye. It looked very slightly bloodshot to him, but he didn't feel it would be appropriate to mention it.

"OK, tell me what I need to know!", demanded Dr Director. Fortunately, she was looking at Dr Hawk when she spoke, and he seemed rather more relaxed.

"Well, I'll start with a quick review of where the CIA are with their investigation. They still have three underwater search teams on station, with naval dive support ships, deep water remotely operated vehicles and a mini-submarine. I'm told that the Pentagon are creating merry hell and demanding their ships back, but the CIA are hanging on in there. "They have called in professional military air crash investigators from the US Air Force to analyze the wreckage and confirm that all on board, including Shego, are dead, but that team is hamstrung by the fact that they haven't been told what they are looking for, and know nothing about Shego's unique capabilities, so they have made some errors in their preliminary conclusions". 'Digger' Hawk pulled a small remote control unit from his pocket and pressed a button. The screen on Dr Director's wall did his bidding, and a high resolution image of a barely recognisable, partially flattened and severely damaged aircraft cockpit appeared. "The military investigation has so far concluded that the deadlock on the cabin door was burnt out by means unknown, and that when the plane's fuel tank exploded, the catch on the cockpit door burst due to an enormous pressure wave that deformed the cockpit rear bulkhead and ultimately severed the cockpit section from the rest of the plane. The CIA knows, but the investigators do not, that the 'means unknown' was Shego making like a plasma cutter. The body of the pilot, or err... the central mass, anyway... was found in her seat. Her harness had stretched significantly on impact, cause of death massive blunt force trauma consistent with a 150mph impact. Analysis of the background sounds on the CVR tape led the military investigators to report that Shego had definitely strapped herself into the harness when she first sat in the left hand seat. However the CVR stopped recording when the plane exploded, and forensic investigation shows that she was not strapped into the seat at the time of the impact with the sea.

"Because the cockpit glazing was smashed by the impact, and the cockpit door is still missing, the working hypothesis of the official investigation is that Shego survived the explosion, which the investigators have determined would have subjected the cockpit to a sudden pressure wave through the open cockpit door, likely to render occupants unconscious. They have concluded that this was what happened to the pilot, who the post mortem determined was apparently unconscious at the point of impact, but that Shego was less affected by the pressure wave and at some point before impact, possibly while semi-conscious, undid her belts. "They are therefore assuming that Shego's body was either ejected from the cockpit through the windscreen... err... windshield... on impact, or drifted out later when the cockpit was on the sea bed. From there, the CIA are assuming it was then carried away by ocean currents, and may credibly have been eaten by sharks. The US Navy are still searching for a body, as well as recovering more of the wreckage of the plane, and the crash investigators are still on the case, trying to answer several remaining questions, but unless they make a dramatic breakthrough, that's where they are heading...", said Hawk, "...but they are barking up the wrong tree. My new colleague here, Mike Jones, has been doing some analysis of the evidence which contradicts their findings".

And then, just when Mike thought he was he going to get away with it, 'Digger' dropped him right in it. "But I'll let him tell you all about it. Mike?"

Beads of sweat instantly formed on Mike's brow, as Dr Director turned her monocular gaze in his direction and wordlessly demanded answers.

"Well... err.. it's...", he stammered, and then cleared his throat, playing for time. After a couple of seconds, or could it have been lifetimes, his brain fortunately unfroze, and then he was off and running. "Basically, I ran the cockpit audio through a complex digital filter matrix, and used a technique called audio spectrum chromatography to deconstruct the sound...", he said, then mentally chastised himself for 'talking geek' to the Director of Operations. "I identified and eliminated every one of several thousand component sounds until I came down to... err..", he looked at Dr Hawk, who obligingly pushed a button on his remote. A sound rather like ripping tissue paper filled Betty Director's office for a few seconds. "You can't hear that at all on the cockpit audio, it's very low amplitude and very deep in the mix, but now I've isolated it I'm pretty much certain that is the electrical interference caused when Shego uses her plasma power! From that I can identify Shego using plasma in various ways at various intensities before she entered the cockpit, then to actually get into the cockpit, again to melt a small pistol, and once more to render the pilot unconscious. But in between those last two, there were four unidentified bursts of plasma just after Shego closed the cockpit door for the last time. It took a while, but as you can see here...", Callum Hawk again prodded the remote and a picture of the cockpit doorway, minus door, with four red circles overlaid on the catch side of the frame, "it turns out that if you know what to look for, you can see that she spot welded the cockpit door shut. But here is the really interesting thing", he said, as Callum Hawk obliged again and a picture of four spot welds appeared. "The top three welds burst, along with the catch, when the plane exploded. But the bottom weld didn't burst, and the cockpit door wasn't blown open when the plane exploded. If you look at the bottom weld, it was, in fact, cut, before the plane hit the sea".

"Cut?", asked Dr Director, sharply.

"By Shego", confirmed Mike Jones. "Which implies that she almost certainly exited the cockpit at some time before it struck the sea! It would appear that for reasons unknown, she chose to die outside the cockpit rather than sitting strapped in to the co-pilot's seat. My hypothesis is that she knew there was no chance at all if she stayed where she was and decided to see if there were any options outside. So far, though, I can't find any..."

"Thank you, Mr Jones! Commendable work. I'd like you to keep working on the problem, I need to know if there is the slightest possibility that Shego is alive. Within reason you may call on any of the resources of Global Justice to further your investigation. As of now you have a Gold priority clearance, I'd like daily reports both on your progress and the CIA's progress", ordered Dr Director. "Understood!", responded Mike Jones, following Dr Hawk's lead and standing up. As he shuffled out the door, he raised an eyebrow to himself. All the resources of Global Justice? Shego would need the constitution of Captain Scarlet (the indestructible TV puppet of his childhood), to survive falling into the sea from 10,000 feet. All this was a hell of a lot of effort just for him to find out what kind of shark it was that ate her battered corpse. It wasn't exactly up there with mapping the human genome as a contribution to the sum of human knowledge. Still, the science could be interesting, he mused...


	14. Rage rage against the dying of the light

'Sixteen thousand...'; Shego braced herself solidly in the open doorway at the rear of the cockpit section of the plane she had so recently been piloting, as the horizon, the sea and the sky span crazily through her vision. Her eyes were already streaming from the effect of the 150mph wind, and she was still partly sheltered by the mass of metal around her! She was waiting for the distant coast of Africa to pass through her field of vision at just the right angle for her to kick off towards it, belly down. She needed the reference, the haze made picking out the horizon between sea and sky far too difficult with the wind in her face. And time was definitely not on her side! At a rough guess, based on an assumption about the terminal velocity of the cockpit section of the plane, she now had less than thirty seconds before it hit the sea, with or without her on board. Her whole head was still ringing like a bell from the pressure wave that had accompanied the 'whump' of the rapid chain reaction of sequential fuel tank explosions, and judging by the intense pain in her left ear and the sticky feeling around the side of her face, that eardrum had perforated yet again. So far it had always healed up, amazingly quickly as well, her comet enhanced healing powers working wonders with injuries that would normally never heal, but miracles took longer - and the breakdown of scar tissue was one of those miracles. And the scar tissue meant that the damned thing kept bursting again under stress, and it hurt like hell. All she needed was a couple of years without blowing the thing out again, and it would be as good as new, but she had been telling herself that for ten years now and hadn't managed to get that far.

'...Twenty thousand, Twenty-one thousand...'. Height getting critical now, she thought, and then decided that if she didn't get a break soon she was gonna have to jump anyway and take a chance on not being shredded in mid-air by the several tonnes of fast-spinning jagged metal she was currently riding.

'...Twenty-four thousand, Twenty-five thousand...'. Shit, twenty seconds to a big splash if her maths was right. If her maths was wrong, she doubted she'd know much about it. Then suddenly the horizon flew up from beneath her, Africa directly in front of her, at a jaunty angle. 'Fuck it, that'll do!', she said to herself as she launched herself with a two-footed thrust into the airflow, head first and down, arms tucked in to her sides, desperate for speed and separation.

'...Twenty-eight thousand...'. She could barely see, unprotected eyes all but closed yet still streaming as she accelerated towards 300mph, noticing through tears that the sea was coming closer, faster and realising that her time on this earth was spooling down ever more rapidly. And then two things happened in quick succession. At about 280mph, the Orange boiler suit suddenly ballooned, and then shredded, followed a second later by the adult diaper, but not before it had thrown her into a violent uncontrolled tumble. As she struggled to stabilise herself, she felt a violent and very painful blow on her right upper bicep and she saw a sharp-edged piece of wreckage tumble away. The pain was excruciating, but her arm still seemed to work as she finally righted herself and opted for a slightly less extreme, more horizontal track, falling at perhaps 200mph and moving out across the sky from the debris storm as far as possible. Clammy, diaper-rash afflicted skin stings in 200mph wind blast. Who knew? If this was nude skydiving, you could keep it.

'...Thirty-three thousand...'. This was where she thought she ought to be feeling grief. She could only feel burning regret that the arsehole in Langley who organised this horror show wasn't going to die a long, lingering, painful death by her hand. Maybe she could haunt the little bastard to death instead! Shit, the sea was hurtling up at her now, and time was slowing down. If she had been wearing a parachute, she'd be thinking she had left it too late to open it. No point in spreading her body now, just to try and slow her fall and get an extra second of life. The faster she hit, the better really. She knew she wouldn't actually feel it as such, it would be like hitting concrete at 200mph. Well, she hoped not. She pushed her head hard down again to accelerate and make sure. '

...Thirty-four thousand...', and it was touch and go whether she'd finish the next count. It was true, though, not that she was ever going to be able to tell anybody, that the last second of her life was also going to be the longest. But why hadn't her entire life flashed before her eyes yet? As she mentally formed that thought, suddenly she was experiencing a vivid flashback. But not the one she was expecting...

She was 14 again. And really not coping with being a green freak. Or with being 14, really. Or with being able to do the impossible, without getting the rush she used to get before when easier things were more difficult and scary... Or with Henry (or anybody, really, but especially Henry) trying to order her not to do something, anything. So she was standing on the top tier of the scaffolding swathing the Go Tower, looking down at the sea far below, and the tiny figure of her brother Mike standing on the rocks far below with a camcorder, ready to record her utterly pointless quest for cliff-diving immortality. Mike waved, so she took three big paces back and then launched herself as fast as she could towards and over the edge of the platform, in a gloriously perfect swan dive, from 250 feet above the sea. She had a plan. It scared her just thinking about it, unlike most things now, so she was looking forward to the rush. Just as she was about to hit the sea at bone-breaking speed, she fired a blast of plasma from her hands, straight at the water. She had sort of assumed in an optimistic High School Physics kind of way that she could slow her fall by firing a blast downwards. It made a kind of sense, but she wasn't certain enough to try it over concrete. Water, on the other hand, well even if she was wrong, now that she was the incredible hulk, worst case she'd get away with a bit of pain. What could possibly go wrong? Unexpectedly, she didn't seem to slow down at all. Worse, and even more unexpectedly, the water beneath her just vanished as it turned into steam. No bone-crunching impact with the sea, just barely tolerable steam-room heat as she continued to fall through the hole she was burning in Go Bay! Making it up as she went along, she cut the plasma power and hit a brick wall of water, which hurt about as much as she was expecting, but then suddenly there was nothing. Then pain, beeping of machines, a metal halo around her skull, delirium, gaps in her memory, confusion, nothing from the neck down for a month, thinking that was going to be the rest of her life now, Henry ranting at her for being stupid, then more pain as severed spinal nerves impossibly healed, and some unforgettably terrifying nightmares as even the brain injuries repaired themselves.

She had hit the sea bed, broken her neck and almost everything else, including her skull. Henry had run outside from a meeting with the architects, dived in and pulled her out of the water.

For some reason she had never got round to trying that dive again. Possibly because she had never been closer to death than she was then. Except for right now. But with less than a second between Shego and certain oblivion, she suddenly had an improbable lifeline! She punched her fists up over her head and fired them up at full power and closed her eyes tight.

'...Thirty-six thousand...'. She wasn't dead. She felt like she was inside a steam hose, but she was alive. How long for? The Atlantic could be half a mile deep. It could be three miles deep. Or anything in between. At 250 miles per hour, no time to think, what to do about it? Acting on instinct, she forced her outstretched arms a bit further behind her ears and was rewarded by a sickeningly violent body slam in the chest, stomach and thighs, and a feeling like a super-heated water cannon trying to rip her poor abused tits right off her chest. If she had had time to take in a proper breath before she had hit the sea, it would have been knocked out of her time and time again. The bruises that Kimmy had inflicted were as nothing to the sustained and brutal beating that Shego was subjecting herself to as she bounced down a rough scalding-hot water-slide of her own making at over 200mph, slowly forcing the translation of her near vertical plummet into horizontal speed. She felt herself slowing slightly, and the steam got hotter, so she reduced the power in her hands until the temperature became just tolerable again, and continued to lift the direction of travel. She wasn't sure, but she felt like she was travelling slighty upwards now, and slowing as she climbed. Her lungs were bursting, and all the time she was definitely slowing now. Water engulfed her ankles, knees and thighs, clawing her back, and suddenly the water rushed into the remaining steam-filled void she had cut in the water, and she slowed rapidly, scalded and abused flesh caressed by cool water and then attacked by the stinging salt. She opened her eyes and looked up, cutting her plasma. There, above her but not too far, looking at that moment like the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, was the surface. And, she realised, she might yet drown before she reached it. She kicked out towards the light as hard as she could, fighting the overwhelming instinctive urge to breathe in despite being underwater. The surface was getting closer now, but not close enough. She felt the blackness closing in at the edge of her consciousness, as oxygen starvation began to close down her body and brain. Still she kicked for the surface, weakening but desperate. Nothing now but the vestiges of a massive adrenaline and endorphin spike was keeping her going, but she was fading... fading...

'Forty-four thousand...', and breathe! Glorious fresh air! Sunlight! Alive! Fucking hell, alive! Ha ha ha! Alive! Sweet daylight, sweet air, sweet life, sweet miracles!

'Forty-fi...', the little voice in the back of her head was continuing the count she had started before she undid her belts in the cockpit, the count that was originally only about telling her how long she had to get clear before it hit the sea. Quarter of a mile behind her the booming crash of a huge chunk of wreckage hitting the sea cut it off short, and she slowly turned herself around as the sea still boiled, marking the spot. As she floated there, still breathing deeply, she became aware of the water in front of her being dappled by little splashes, as a hail of nuts and bolts and unidentifiable lumps of metal hit the water, some as close as fifty yards away. Looking up, she could see the wings, one of them trailing burning fuel and black smoke, fluttering down like satanic confetti. Even higher into the sky was another strata of wreckage, seat cushions, paperwork and the like. At first, Shego was content to watch it all fall, to watch it hit the sea, and to enjoy just being alive. But watching the wreckage fall, and thinking about the late pilot for who 'sorry' was such an inadequate word, and a little-leaguer who would never see his father at a game, and that poor Algerian bastard, Shego's 'joie de vivre' was soon supplanted once again by righteous anger. If CIA HQ at Langley had been within her reach at that very moment, it would not have been a good place to be.

In a few minutes, there was complete silence. No splashing of wreckage, no jet engines overhead, no bird song, nothing. Suddenly, Shego felt very small and lonely. And she realised that she hurt. Everywhere. She was covered in cuts and bruises, all of which were now flaring up now that the adrenaline rush that had bought her here had faded, muscles and ligaments had been strained to their very limits and were now protesting, and she had scalded almost her entire body, including some particularly tender parts of it that you would never ever want to scald. The sea salt was making every inch of sore flesh scream at her like it was on fire, and at the moment, that was all of her flesh, and in addition, her breasts felt like they had been stamped on several times by an angry elephant in metal soled boots.

On the plus side, the diaper rash wasn't bothering her any more. She glanced down at the water and was shocked to see that it was red. Blood? She was bleeding? And not a trivial amount, either. Certainly enough to attract hungry sharks! But where from? Everything hurt, where to look? She suddenly remembered the mid-air impact and looked to her right arm, and was greeted by a gaping wound. Damn! Of course it would heal. A bandage to stop the bleeding, keep it still for a bit, and she would be fine. The blood loss didn't look like it was critical. Yet. But there was a problem. She didn't have a bandage. She also couldn't keep it still if she wanted to get herself out of here. She had been half hoping that the plane's life-raft would have popped up from the deep by now, but if it hadn't by now, it was never going to. She really didn't fancy fighting off sharks, and if she kept on bleeding then she'd be in real trouble with blood loss soon enough. She realised that there was really only one thing to do, and she was definitely not enthusiatic. She positioned her right arm so that the cut closed up, and while treading water with her legs, she fired up a finger jet of plasma on her left hand, and with a steady hand began welding and cauterising the wound closed. Alone with the ocean, she allowed herself to scream as she did it, a scream laden with pain, with frustration and with rage. When she had finished, she was breathing heavily again, her right arm was defaced by a deep, angry jagged wheal of burnt and agonisingly painful flesh, but the bleeding had stopped. Now, she looked around herself one last time, took a look at the late morning sun, did some rough mental arithmetic and geography to work out which way her nearest chance of landfall was, now that both the continent of Africa, and the islands of Cape Verde were concealed from her by the curvature of the earth, then factored in anything she could remember about Atlantic oceanography. And then she took a deep breath, and struck out in a lazy front crawl. She knew she had about sixty nautical miles to cover, plus whatever the fickle ocean currents added to the trip, provided she didn't completely miss the islands of Cape Verde. The sea wasn't cold, but frankly, she was in no fit state to be starting an unsupported marathon swim. On the other hand, it was either do this or chose to stay where she was and become shark bait. By all sense and logic, she should already be dead. Nobody would possibly believe that she had survived. She didn't, and she was the one swimming away from it all. She was almost tempted to check herself for wings and a harp. Or horns and a tail.

It was about twelve agonising hours of metronomic swimming later that it occurred to her that if she herself didn't really believe that she had survived, neither would anybody else, including the CIA. By then, the heat of her anger had been subsumed by pain and fatigue into a terrible and coldly calculating determination to visit vengeance upon the root cause of her present desperate situation. They say that revenge is a dish best served cold. Alone in the dark, Shego was chilling hers in a deep freeze! Every muscle, every sinew, every inch of her flesh was ablaze, and yet she had no option but to swim. Then the rain started, and the sea got up. On the one hand, it compounded her misery, but on the other it saved her from the dehydration that was already causing her to cramp up. She took a brief break from the swimming, on her back, mouth open, greedily drinking the water falling from the sky in sheets until she could drink no more, and then once again, she forced her battered and exhausted body back into motion, and struck out once more for the distant flashing light that was now her goal. Once the sun had finally gone down, before land had appeared on the horizon, she had feared that she might spend the night swimming in circles, but as darkness fell she was grateful for the bloom of the beam of a lighthouse passing overhead, a lighthouse that could only be on one of the islands of the Cape Verde chain. Just before dawn, the light itself was clearly in view well above the horizon, and she was using the sequence of its flashes to pace her ruined body as she continued to swim, stroke after agonising stroke, not daring to pause or try to take a rest lest she was unable to start again.

At 5 minutes after ten in the morning local time, twenty two and a half hours after finding herself in the sea, Shegos knee hit the sand of a deserted beach on the north shore of Ilha de Santo Antão. For three hours she had been swimming on nothing more than the power of distilled hatred and anger. Every reserve gone, every inch of her body spent, every nerve screaming, she had nothing left. Except anger and hatred. So she had used them. And now she had made landfall. But there was no way she could stand up. She tried, but her arms collapsed, her legs refused to obey and she slumped back into the surf. In desperation, she painfully half leopard-crawled, half dragged her naked, battered, bleeding body above the tide line, and then just as she was set to collapse, she realised that she might be seen if she lay in the open, so she spent another ten agonising minutes dragging herself still further across the black sand and jagged razor sharp rocks of the beach, until she was well hidden from above under an overhanging boulder. Then, and only then, she passed out unconscious and slept the sleep of the dead.


	15. More Monkey Magic!

Ron heard the twang of the bow string, but also felt the approaching arrow at a visceral level. Thus it was that he found himself four feet off the ground, mid-way through a Wooden Monkey Spinning Heel of Teak kick that was so exquisitely timed that it cleaved the approaching arrow into two in flight, before something struck him... which was, amazingly, that the arrow hadn't struck him at all! As he landed on one toe in a perfect Tall Monkey Balances on Tip of Bamboo Cane stance, he yelled "Hey! I've still got it!".

Indeed he did still have it. For about 6 hours. And then the mystical monkey power started to gently fade away. At first, he noticed that still had it but that he had to pay a little attention or it started to wander off somewhere on it own. But gradually over the next few hours he had to concentrate harder and harder on what he was trying to do lest it let him down, and he felt that it was soaking away like water into the sands of time until sometime after 12 hours or so had passed, it was as elusive and frustratingly, maddeningly intermittent and diffuse as it had ever been. All the more maddening, in fact, because now he knew what Mystical Monkey Power should feel like!

But on the upside, Ron did get his hearty breakfast, and he did also find that the disturbing visions or hallucinations had stopped the moment he had taken off the Cuff of Sosumiha. And then he spent the rest of the day demonstrating his incredible mastery of Tai Sheng Pek Kwar to the students of the school, until the last flickering embers of his awesome power finally blinked out that evening, unfortunately in the middle of a high-speed, high-risk demonstration of Wooden Monkey Jo Staff forms...

Ron was very hopeful that the egg-shaped bump on his head would subside overnight.

He was just about to retire to his tatami mat for a well-earned snooze when Sensei sent for him.

He found the rotund grand-master in his pagoda, where he was sitting with the Yamanouchi librarian and a couple of his assistant archivists, surrounded by huge piles of ancient and dusty silk scrolls. Ron wondered what they might reveal about the Cuff of Sosumiha. When he had shucked it off, Ron had been certain that he wanted nothing more to do with its accursed hallucinations, but after a few hours, and more significantly with the clear memory of the mainline thrill of full bodied mystical monkey power coursing through his own body fresh in his mind, Ron was hoping that he would be told that he could take another hit of that bong, to coin a phrase, without losing his mind or worse. He wasn't to be left waiting for an answer.

"Stoppable-san!", Sensei greeted him. "I have good news. You have nothing to fear from the cuff of Sosumiha. You are not the first to experience these visions, and we are relieved to tell you that no harm came to the previous mystical monkey master who had the same experience. Well... not from the visions, at least..."!

Ron's initial joy was supplanted by suspicion, but Sensei, with occasional interjections and corrections from the librarian, explained that every single one of the original ancient mystical monkey masters had spent a full hour meditating in between the four magic monkey idols to absorb mystical monkey power, as part of the initiation ritual. By contrast, Ron had managed only a few seconds of exposure before the idols were destroyed. Rufus of course had spent a similar time absorbing the magic, but in much the same way as a 32lb Turkey takes longer to cook than an 8lb bird, what had lightly magically toasted Ron had burnt Rufus to a metaphorical mystical crisp.

Of course, this scant exposure explained the intermittent nature of Ron's own inner mystical monkey, and no Monkey Master had ever been as 'underdone' in the entire history of mystical monkey power, but there was once one of the ancient monkey masters, Master Kwon, who had made a regular practice of meditating and fasting almost to the point of death. And then one day, Kwon had donned the cuff of Sosumiha after a particularly gruelling period of devotion. With his own inner mystical monkey severely weakened by his debilitated physical state, he was stricken by what he knew to be memories. He knew they were memories because Kwon had fought in some of the battles he was remembering as one of the guardians of Sosumiha, but he knew that they were not his memories, because he had been in a different part of the battlefield on each occasion and had seen the same events from a completely different point of view. At one point he even saw himself, as he fought alongside Master Wei, who had been wearing the Cuff of Sosumiha at the time. He realised that he was experiencing the memories of the Cuff itself. Seeking the guidance of the Shaman of Sosumiha, he learned that the Cuff of Sosumiha was imbued with the purest essence of the mystical energy of Sun Wukong himself. Effectively it had its own mystical inner monkey spirit, which melded seamlessly with the inner mystical monkey of the wearer to magically generate and maintain the physical form of Toshimiru. Normally the dominant mystical monkey by far was always the inner mystical monkey of the wearer, but in the case of a barely alive Master Kwon, and apparently now of the flickering mystical inner monkey of the Ronmeister, the inner monkey spirit of the cuff of Sosumiha had the upper hand, and its memories became the memories of the wearer.

Unfortunately, Master Kwon became obsessed with these new memories and began working with a scribe to transcribe them all to a detailed written history, a very novel idea for its time. This narrative was carefully crafted so as not to divulge the secret of the Cuff of Sosumiha to any reader who might not already know of it, while telling the story of the heroic battles of the Guardians. It had been passed down through the generations at Yamanouchi, and comprised one of the very oldest complete documents known to have existed, let alone still in existence, anywhere in Japan. It was written in 'Jo-dai Nihongo', a primitive form of old Japanese, on the finest silk, but the fact that the scrolls could still be read today, almost two millennia later, was almost miraculous.

Master Kwon starved himself to the point of death more and more often in his zeal to explore and to write the legend of the Guardians of Sosumiha, giving his body less and less time to properly recover between meditation sessions. Eventually it caught up with him. During his very last post-meditation session wearing the Cuff of Sosumiha, he had told the scribe that he had just realised that he could remember things that far pre-dated the forging of the Cuff of Sosumiha, disjointed episodes from the mists of pre-history. He told the scribe that he was convinced that they were memories of Sun Wu Kong, the Monkey King himself. The scribe was obviously pretty sceptical about this - he added a footnote on that particular scroll to the effect that Master Kwon was rambling and that he thought he was probably hallucinating at that point but Master Kwong was so excited by these new 'memories' that he began a new fast a scant two days after his final session. The suspicion that his final recorded 'memories' were actually the hallucinations of a dying man was hardly allayed when, a week into this new round of meditation, he was found to have died in his sleep. According to the then Shaman of Sosumiha, as faithfully recorded by the Scribe, Master Kwon had suffered what was best interpreted with the benefit of modern understanding of human physiology, as a massive heart attack in his sleep, brought on by acute starvation.

With the consensus view around the table that the 'visions' generated by Ron's use of the Cuff of Sosumiha were entirely harmless, Ron was quite looking forward to wearing it again. But, after first thanking the librarian and his staff for their assistance, Sensei bade Ron walk with him.

They headed back to the small, flagstone island in the centre of the calm oasis of Sensei's formal garden. Much of the evidence of his earlier meeting with Sensei had been cleared away, although Ron did notice a couple of tiny strips of blue denim and a few wooden splinters that had escaped the best efforts of the initiates tasked with maintaining the serene beauty of the formal garden.

Sensei once again guided Ron to the stone benches they had sat at that morning. Once they were seated comfortably, or as comfortably as it is possible to be seated on stone benches, Sensei spoke. "Stoppable-san, re-discovering the Cuff of Sosumiha is indeed most propitious! We have something... very significant... to ask of you." With no fanfare, he produced an ornate gold-trimmed envelope from under his flowing robe and handed it to Ron, who took it hesitantly. He opened it slowly and read the contents with some little confusion...

"You want me... to enter a martial arts tournament, Sensei?", Ron asked, his voice betraying his surprise.

"Yes, Stoppable-san. Victory in this tournament will reflect great honour on Yamanouchi School. But that is not the only reason we wish to accept this invitation."

"No, Sensei?" asked Ron, sounding even more confused.

"Indeed, Stoppable-san. This tournament is organised by Master Lo Pin through the auspices of his Dragon Fist Academy. But Lo Pin has also a darker side. He has long been a leading underworld figure. Lo Pin, continuing the legacy of his father, has been responsible for almost unchecked piracy and extortion in the South China sea for many decades. His island fortress, where his academy is also based, is seemingly beyond the reach of any law. He has brought great shame to those of us who believe that the way of the warrior should be a force for good and not evil. For this reason, Yamanouchi school alumni association has sought to keep a very close eye on Master Lo Pin and Dragon Fist Academy. But... we have not been as successful as we had hoped, Stoppable-San..."

Sensei went on to explain that through their network of contacts, Yamanouchi knew with reasonable certainty that Lo-Pin was to say the least no friend of any of the Chinese or Hong-Kong Triads, of the Japanese Yakuza or of any other underworld organisation. The Alumni Association had also reported that in very recent years Lo-Pin had diversified into legitimate businesses throughout the region, adding to his wealth and power. They had also learned, from alumni sources in the insurance industry and in law enforcement, that there has been an unexplained change in the pattern and frequency of Lo Pin's piracy in the last couple of years, the significance of which, if any, was still not understood.

"Stoppable San, we have already placed two students undercover with the Dragon Fist Academy in an attempt to find out more. The first disappeared without a trace. The second we sent to find her predecessor also disappeared. They were last seen heading for Lo Pin's island with other students, but they never returned to report as expected and all computerised records of their existence, or of them ever having existed was subsequently erased without trace. We greatly fear for them, but we have not been able to reach the island to try to find out what became of them. Until now." said Sensei.

"So... you would like me to be number three? Won't I just disappear as well?"

"No, Stoppable-san, we do not believe so. Firstly because you will only be on the island for the tournament and will then be returning here. Secondly because we now believe that our previous undercover students were somehow undone by the background checks carried out by Lo-Pin. Lo Pin has tentacles everywhere, it seems, and was able to scrutinise every aspect of our two brave volunteers exceptionally well crafted cover stories. Their false identities had been painstakingly constructed, each with a lifetime of falsified official records created to back them up. We believed they were unbreakable, because Yamanouchi has penetrated many underworld organisations over the last 50 years, and nobody has ever managed to unmask even one of our deep cover operatives before. Nevertheless, it seems that Lo Pin was somehow able to see through our elaborate subterfuge as easily as if there was no subterfuge at all, and to discover their true identities. Our best hope is that they might be still alive and imprisoned on Lo-Pin's island. And who better to find them than a man who has no 'real past' for Lo-Pin to discover and who Lo Pin has invited to come and visit?"

"But Sensei, I have a real past! I think I've appeared on the TV news somewhere in the world every few weeks for the last two years! Usually in the back of shot and sometimes in my boxer shorts, but..."

"You do, Stoppable-san. But Toshimiru does not! Or... should I say... 'Saru Chounouryoku' does not."

"Saru who?" asked Ron.

"Saru Chounoroku is your new alter-ego, Stoppable-san. He is a lifelong student of Yamanouchi who was left at the door of the school as a tiny baby, and he has grown up entirely within these walls. He is making his first ever trip outside the school to compete in this tournament. There is no cover story for Lo-Pin's spies to unpick, nor any false trail for them to uncover. As hard as they may look, you don't and won't ever exist, and cannot be shown to be anybody other than who you claim to be. "This file...", said Sensei, as he reached under his robes once more and pulled out a manila folder which he handed to Ron, "...contains everything you need to memorise about Saru Chounoroku! Learn it well, Stoppable-san!"

"Learn? Sensei? Have you seen my grades? I hate pop-quizzes! I have a terrib... Oh!". Ron was bought up short when he opened the file and discovered a single sheet of sparsely typed A4 paper bearing his cover story. There was a name, a date when he was supposedly found, and a paragraph saying that basically he had spent 25 years intensively studying Tai Sheng Pek Kwar. Even Ron was confident he could memorise those two key facts. Behind the sheet of A4 were a couple of 8x10 glossy pictures of the missing Yamanouchi alumni, with their both their real names and cover names written on the back, and a sheaf of detailed background briefing notes on Lo Pin, his organisation, his island and previous Dragon Fist tournaments. "Stoppable-san, it is very important that you destroy this file before you leave Yamanouchi!"

"That won't be a problem, Sensei! I have my own portable shredder. He's called Rufus!" said Ron. The little guy was currently enjoying being made a fuss of by the younger students elsewhere at Yamanouchi and Ron would have to bring him up to speed later. But he had one big concern.

Actually, he had a number of big concerns, but one he was convinced was insurmountable. "Sensei, how can I pretend to be somebody who grew up at Yamanouchi when I don't speak a single word of Japanese?"

"But Stoppable-san, did you not realise that this morning that when you were wearing the Cuff of Sosumiha, when I spoke to you in English you replied in English, but when I spoke to you in Japanese you replied in fluent Japanese?" queried Sensei.

"I did?" said Ron, surprised. "Yes, Stoppable-san. We believe it may be another fortuitous side-effect of the memories you experienced while wearing the Cuff of Sosumiha. You were using a very archaic form of speech that we would now call Old High Japanese, but that is nothing that cannot be explained away. Until this morning it was Hirotaka-san's honour to accept this dangerous mission, but we could not have known how incredibly successful our great experiment would be. You are a Mystical Monkey Kung-Fu Master, supreme exponent of the five martial forms of Tai Sheng Pek Kwar, and we are in need of your boundless courage and your immense skill, Master Stoppable! Will you help us in our hour of need?"

Ron felt his chest inflate as he basked in Sensei's first ever use of the honorific title 'Master Stoppable'. Part of him knew that Sensei was deliberately massaging his ego, but he couldn't help himself. "Sensei... it would be my great honour! Yamanouchi shall be victorious. And if our people are on the island, I shall find them and bring them home!"

Ron bowed formally. Even as he did so he realised that he had no idea whether he had bitten off more than he could chew. Mystical Monkey Power truly was feeling more like a curse than a gift!


	16. Tales from the Spa dimension

Kim felt herself melt ever further into the comfortable massage table. She imagined that there were over-boiled noodles all over Hong Kong right at that moment that were less relaxed than she now felt. The by any measure stunningly beautiful Asian masseuse who had spent the last hour expertly and intensively manipulating almost every inch of her oil-anointed body, stepped back, smiled at her and said 'And now, Madam, you should relax in the spa-bath and allow your muscles to recover before the final stage of your programme! I will return in a little over half an hour...'

"Thank you, Miss Chang!" said, Kim, having noted the masseuse' name tag a little earlier, as she self-consciously adjusted the tiny but luxuriously appointed white fluffy towel, which was all that had been intermittently protecting her modesty for many of the past three hours.

The door closed behind Miss Chang and Kim languidly pulled herself up to a sitting position, allowing the small and now aromatherapy-oil impregnated rectangle of cloth to fall into her lap, and then she swivelled through 90 degrees and slumped back against the wall of the private hotel spa suite she now had entirely to herself.

This had been entirely surreal couple of days, she decided, as she looked around the palatial treatment room.

oOo

She had gone straight from one kind of surreal (losing her temper, tearing a huge strip off of Dr Director, not only swearing at her but even making her cry, something that she could scarcely believe had really happened), via a night in her own bed, with only Pandaroo to help her cope with the horrific nightmares that she suspected unhappily would be a feature of her nights for a while, to a whole other kind of surreal, when an airline limousine picked her up at home at the end of a day of frantic packing ("Just how many different gi's does a girl need?") and delivered her to the VIP set-down zone at Middleton airport, and then she was whisked into the ultra-exclusive, snootier than first-class, VIP departure lounge, where she discovered the joys of squidgy leather couches, deep carpets, crisp white linen and canapés, all accompanied by a string quartet, a corporate CEO and a visiting diplomat, the latter two being fellow passengers on her flight. There she was served expensive European bottled water, and offered a selection of exotic fruit juices to wash down her voluvant and other snacks (the corporate CEO seemed to be enjoying a selection of fine wines, Kim noticed - she had obviously been given the 'under 21' menu to select from), before being ushered across a red-carpeted air-bridge and into the uber-exclusive upper deck lounge of a Boeing 747-400, where she had a leather seat that was as large and as comfortable as any she had ever sat in, let alone on a plane. Even Mr Nakatomi's private jet had been less opulent than this cabin. 'How the other half fly!', Kim remembered thinking as she boarded.

The breath-taking gourmet food that was served soon after take-off combined with the incredibly cossetting first class seat and the previous two nights of seriously curtailed sleep soon lulled her into the land of nod, a deep and relaxing sleep only interrupted by a brief 'touch and go' stop at LAX, where the corporate fat cat disembarked, a couple of necessary trips to the fittingly sumptuous VIP deck lavatory, and another gourmet feast. She had awoken for the final time, as well rested as anybody ever could be (although her allowance might not stretch to VIP international air travel every time she needed a night of nightmare free sleep, she had wryly told herself at the time), to a light but now familiarly exquisitely prepared breakfast, and then was able to gaze out across the myriad twinkling lights of the densely packed sky-scrapers of Hong-Kong. The plane soon banked to line up with the runway at Chek Lap Kok, as dawn chased it to the ground. From there, another red carpet, a walk through a special VIP immigration and customs channel to another VIP lounge, and then a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow appeared to whisk a still dazed Kim, who had never previously imagined that such a thing as opulence fatigue could even exist, through the madness of the start of the Hong Kong morning rush hour to her hotel.

When Wade had told her that she was booked into the most expensive, luxurious and spectacular hotel in the whole of Hong Kong, she hadn't really appreciated what that might entail. She soon began to get an idea. Impeccably dressed functionaries were everywhere, unloading her luggage from the trunk of the hotel's Rolls and fussing around her as she was escorted into a cavernously palatial lobby area to a front desk the size of the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, to be told that her room, the 'Dragon Queen Suite' was ready for her. Kim suddenly felt horribly underdressed, given that she was wearing fashion slacks and a long sleeved crop top, surrounded by more starched collars, designer dresses and impeccable tailoring than she had ever seen outside a Royal wedding. And that was just the staff!

"Your luggage shall be taken to your suite now, Miss Possible. Would you like to dress for breakfast? Or we can send the chef to your suite! Our client was most insistent that you should have whatever your heart desires at no cost to yourself during your all to brief stay with us." schmoozed the Concierge.

"Dress for breakfast"? Kim felt sure that he didn't mean a karate gi, or indeed an orange Shaolin robe. Beyond what she was wearing, sleepwear, her mission gear, a pessimistically large selection of underwear, and a tiny bikini that she was almost certainly far too chicken to ever be seen in anywhere ever but which Monique had insisted would be perfect for her, she had nothing with her that would be appropriate wear anywhere outside of a dojo, a ring or a temple. She doubted she even owned anything that wouldn't stand out like a high-visibility jacket at breakfast here, and not in any good way!

Perhaps she had communicated her momentary angst through her face a little more expressively than she had intended, but more likely the Concierge in the finest hotel in Hong Kong had seen her rather travel and mission-worn luggage make its way across the the lobby and expertly deduced that it probably didn't contain any Dior, because he said "Of course, if it pleases Madam, the boutique VIP team will attend your suite immediately and will be happy to assist you to complete your wardrobe as you desire."

Kim hesitated, weighing the already finely balanced ethics of accepting hospitality from somebody as unsavoury as Lo Pin, against the need to maintain the cover for her mission, however inconsequential that mission might be. And then she realised that if Lo Pin was willing to fund an expensive designer frock so that she could dine in the restaurant rather than her room that evening, she could donate it to charity later and help Lo Pin put something back into society. Win win!

"Of course, it would all be entirely chargeable to our client's account...", said the Concierge, trying to be helpful while misunderstanding Kim's apparent momentary indecision.

"Oh, of course!" said Kim, who at that moment suddenly realised that the Concierge might have made a similarly cynical snap assumption about the nature of her relationship with the extremely rich man who was showering such largesse on a teenage girl, and was feeling a little soiled even for thinking it. "But I was just thinking that I ate a lovely breakfast on the plane and I really am not at all hungry at the moment. Maybe we could arrange for the boutique people to come on up later and I can speak to them about something to wear for dinner tonight?"

"Ah! Of course Madame! You must be exhausted after your flight. I will have the bed turned down for you..." said the Concierge, raising his hands in the air ready to clap and set the wheels in motion.

"No, no, really... Thank you!" said Kim, quickly. "I slept very well on the plane, in fact I'm wide awake and raring to go!"

"Ah... then... a tour, perhaps? Allow us to assign you a car and a personal guide for the day, and you can see the Hong Kong. The Tiger Balm Gardens are particularly beautiful...". His hands were again in the air, again about to clap theatrically. That small part of Kim's mind prone to flights of fancy and threads of whimsy wondered how the well-oiled machine of the hotel knew what the concierge expected to happen when he clapped his hands. perhaps it was all for effect, and the concierge was talking into a hidden microphone that the rest of the staff were actually listening in on. Or perhaps the claps were coded? Maybe two rapid claps, a pause and then a big one meant "Tourist guide, stat!".

"No... thank you... really... that sounds wonderful. But I'd set my heart on... a spa treatment!"

There are many ways to remember a fallen comrade, or indeed a fallen foe, but as acts of solemn remembrance go, a spa treatment was a pretty novel one. Nevertheless, it was probably the most entirely appropriate living memorial Kim could give Shego. Well, she reflected, apart from

stealing the British crown jewels. Or overthrowing the government of Uzbekistan and then personally eviscerating several of the more unspeakable people associated with it. But because she wasn't Shego, she was Kim Possible; she couldn't imagine herself doing either of those things. So the Shego memorial spa day it would have to be. Assuming Shego was actually dead, of course. If Shego wasn't dead, Kim decided that she wanted to make this a spa treatment that would make her nemesis green with envy. Greener.

Kim knew little or nothing about spa treatments from personal experience, but she suspected that the more over the top and decadent the whole exercise, and the more opulent the surroundings, the more annoyed with her Shego would be if Kim ever one day had the opportunity to taunt her with details. Although Kim knew in her heart that that was never going to happen...

"Aha! Our world class spa! Of course!" said the concierge, raising his arms aloft and clapping three times, pausing, and then three times more, with an almost flamenco flourish. "Oh yes! Nailed it!", thought Kim, in passing, as people at the far end of the lobby began to mill around purposefully in her peripheral vision.

"And which spa treatment would madam wish to take? We have a truly world class reputation here at..."

"I'd like to make a day of it, please! Everything you have! The whole deal...". 'In for a penny, in for a pound!' thought Kim.

"Madam! Of course! Then you will be requiring our Billionaire Retreat package!" announced the concierge, in a tone indicating that Lo Pin's open tab might be about to take rather more of a beating than mere couture fashion would have dealt it, and almost daring Kim to change her mind. His arms shot aloft with even more enthusiasm and this time he clapped six times in rapid succession. Within seconds a phalanx of impeccably starched white tunics was marching across the vast shimmering lobby towards her, and the concierge barely had time to hand her 'The key to your Private elevator, Madam', before she was whisked away into an entirely alien world, deep below the hotel.

Kim's only exposure to the Spa treatment experience previously had been entirely indirect, on those couple of occasions when she had interrupted Shego in mid preen, but even if she had been a regular client of Middleton Health and Beauty, it would have been no preparation for 'The Billionaire Retreat package'. Within minutes of being led to the 'Empress level' of the hotel spa, which seemed to be dedicated to pampering mainly the wives and concubines of the hyper-rich in surroundings of unimaginable luxury, Kim was wearing a white bath robe so soft and fluffy that felt like it should have cost more than every single item in her wardrobe at home put together, reclining on a chaise long, while relays of beauty therapists worked on her every extremity. Her finger and toe-nails were assaulted by armies of emery-board wielding manicurists and pedicurists, her cuticles were teased with strange concoctions and her hands and feet exfoliated and then bathed and massaged with lotions that Kim suspected cost rather more than the soap and water she normally treated her hands to. The various nail specialists to a woman clucked and fussed over Kim's short, practical finger and toe nails, and it was all she could do to persuade them not to fit her for some spectacular nail extensions that would have made even climbing a rope impossible, let alone punching anybody. In the end her resistance softened slightly and she was persuaded by their entreaties to allow them to install specially trimmed armoured gel nails with a deep and lustrous permanent colour overlay. She chose a particularly vivid dark red that complemented her ginger hair - she hardly ever painted her nails, but she actually loved the effect, although it would take a little getting used to.

Once the hand and foot specialists had done their worst, the multitude withdrew and handed over to a new shift of beauty therapists. Within a trice she was struggling not to be self-conscious as she sat naked bar an unflattering pair of paper knickers, arms folded across her breasts. Shortly thereafter, she mummified from ankle to neck in warm clay-impregnated bandages. While the minerals in the clay worked their magic (although it felt absolutely wonderful, Kim was a tad sceptical that the claimed benefits would have survived even cursory scientific scrutiny), the next shift - the hair specialists and beauticians - fell upon her eagerly. Rejecting the opportunity to have her ears belatedly pierced, she also had a hard time dissuading the hair sculptors from getting artistic with the exciting blank canvas provided by her luxurious ginger locks. Fortunately they were soon distracted repairing the damage inflicted on her hair by the over-tight hair scrunchie she used to maintain her pony-tail. They were also apparently shocked by her atrociously bad split-ends, which they busied themselves with repairing; who knew that HALO parachuting was so bad for one's hair?

Kim had wavered in the face of some spectacular computer generated 'dos' as displayed on a wall-mounted plasma screen that would have given her a whole new look. Although she loved her au-natural flowing flame-red main, her favourite 'hair creation' would have made her a ginger 'dead-ringer' for Star Wars' Princess Leia! Unfortunately it would have precluded wearing a helmet entirely and the first mission she went on would have left her with an irreparable ginger birds nest on her head. Nevertheless, she was very tempted!

After rejecting the heartfelt entreaties of the hair sculptors and the ear piercers, Kim's resistance to the semi-permanent make-up artists was less certain, not least because she thought that the computer generated images of her face with the subtle lip-lining, eye shadow and eyebrow enhancement really did look spectacular, and at least as good as anything she had ever managed to achieve when applying make-up herself. Although the searching questions she asked of Hong Kong's leading make-up artist were probably something of a first for the poor lady; questions like 'It says here that semi-permanent make-up is waterproof. Down to what depth?','Will it survive terminal velocity during free-fall?', 'Do you happen to know, is it radar reflective?'.

The benefit of being on the Billionaires Retreat was that somebody had a hotline to the manufacturer and was able in short order to assure Kim that her eye-shadow would indeed survive the deepest of mixed gas dives unscathed, and that even 250mph air-flow wouldn't smudge her eye-shadow. But perhaps unsurprisingly, the cosmetics manufacturer hadn't conducted any research on the radar observability of their products, since most of their potential clients didn't spend half as much time as Kim did sneaking into supervillain's lairs! Kim was forced to turn to her Kimmunicator and ask guardian angel Wade, who in turn was able to scan the bottled products and reassure her that not only would she not be any more radar reflective with the semi-permanent make-up on her face, but that her infra-red signature might even be marginally reduced!

She almost went ahead with the semi-permanent make-up, but at the last moment, she changed her mind. 'What was I thinking?', she asked herself, as she told the best and brightest of Hong Kong's make-up artists that she wouldn't be requiring their services after all. Their disappointment was palpable, and bizarrely she found herself feeling a little guilty for denying them the chance to (semi) permanently alter her natural appearance. The world of spa clearly had its own internal logic which she was in real danger of becoming swept up by, Kim observed. It was like being inside a bubble where reality doesn't apply!

As soon as the dejected make-up artists had trooped out of the suite, the clay-wrap came off, the paper knickers went with it, and all trace of the sticky clay was hosed and vigorously scrubbed away by the two therapists who had first applied it in the luxury spa suite's integrated marble-and-granite shower room. Kim was then handed one of the small fluffy towels that would be her constant companion for much of the remainder of her spa day, and introduced to a traditional Swedish sauna, complete with icy plunge. After a couple of cycles of sweating profusely in the oppressive heat of the sauna cabin on one side of the private spa suite, before stepping out and jumping naked into the small ice-pool on the other, she was in the mercifully hot shower again, and then being towelled vigorously dry by yet another pair of beauty therapists. And then it was onto the treatment table, and time for the wax.

It began with them showing Kim her face on the big screen, and then cycling through eyebrow shaping options. To be honest, Kim had never even noticed the shape of her eyebrows before, let alone considered changing them, but this wasn't a long term change and she was still feeling bizarrely guilty for denying the make-up artists their canvas, and so after a little umming and ahhing, she made a choice, and then lay back as the hot wax strips were expertly applied to her forehead, and then ripped away. The pain barely registered with Kim; her... unconventional... lifestyle had rather raised her pain threshold some way beyond the norm. The result was as advertised, and although when she looked at the side-by-side 'before and after' pictures on the plasma, she could see nothing wrong with her eyebrows 'au-naturel', the new shape was certainly... different. And better. Probably. Certainly no worse, which Kim was relieved about. In fact despite changing nothing except her eyebrows and her fingernails so far, she realised she was feeling good. Really, really good! Great, in fact!

The waxers, meanwhile were less content. Kim soon realised that they were more used to working with more... matronly clientele, here on the Empress level of the hotel spa. The flawlessness of youth frustrated them. They were unable to find a moustache on Kim's top lip that they could remove, the fine downy hair on Kim's arms and legs apparently wasn't ideally amenable to waxing, which didn't matter because Kim was even less amenable to allowing them to try, and Kim had out of habit shaved her pits and bikini line before getting on the plane. They looked so frustrated that when they said 'There is only one more thing we can possibly do, Madame', Kim said 'Show me' almost out of sympathy. If she'd been thinking a bit more and going with the flow a bit less, she might have held her tongue, or at least been less mortified by what appeared on the screen. Her mons pubis. Complete with ginger bush. She felt her cheeks flush and burn, but she had asked them to show her so she couldn't really object. The screen started scrolling through computer generated images of her crotch, with her pubes arranged in various styles, and she wanted to say "Ewww! No! No way!". But that would be rude. And anyway, it was vaguely intriguing seeing herself 'down there' as others might one day see her, with those weird and wonderful pubic hair arrangements. Her neatly if generously defined and trimmed triangle of red curly hair looked very unkempt besides the litany of 'pubic hairstyles' she was shown, most that she'd never heard of, let alone seen. It also suddenly occurred to her that Monique's ridiculously tiny bikini choice was just slightly smaller than her current bush, so in the unlikely event that she did want to wear it, she'd need a good twenty minutes of undignified contortionism with a razor in the shower first. Or perhaps she could just have the excess waxed away now.

"...and this is a Hollywood!" announced the 'Chief Cosmetic Wax Technician', as her name badge proclaimed her, as a computer doctored image of a completely bald Possible hoo-hah appeared on the big screen. Kim's nose involuntarily wrinkled. Apart from the fact that it would apparently make her look like a plucked chicken (or a pre-pubescent) betwixt her legs, her broader inner disdain for sexual stereotyping (which was the only explanation she could presently come up with for why somebody might want to do such a thing to themselves) was tweaked. She imagined that this would obviously have to be the final slide, and was about to say something when she discovered she was wrong. "From there, of course, we can enhance..." said the chief wax technician, as the same post-hollywood-wax bald labia appeared on the screen, this time augmented with a number of glittering jewels and crystals stuck to the bikini area in the shape of her initials 'KP'.

This was definitely too much for Kim who exclaimed 'Ewww! No way!' before she even realised that she had spoken. "Go back!" she added quickly, anxious to avoid causing offence. "Further... was it 'French'?". The wax tech quickly backed up though the 'pubic hairstyles' slide-pack, slowing down as she approached the 'French' option. It would definitely do the job, she decided as she looked at it. It was definitely smaller than that very risque if not quite indecent bikini in her luggage upstairs. But a bit boring, she thought, looking at the rectangular 'landing strip'. Actually her eye had moments earlier been taken by the slide just after this one. "Can we see the next one, please?". Perfect. Practical but also a little cute, without being tacky. And nobody need ever know. Her next locker room shower would be a good two months hence, by which time it would all have grown out. "I like this one, Please and Thank You!" said Kim, before she could talk herself back out of having it done.

The waxing downstairs hurt. A lot. Even Kim found herself wincing occasionally. There was also a mildly awkweird moment when the wax tech had said "Please open your legs as far as you can, Miss Possible". And then squealed and jumped back in shock when Kim had promptly and literally obliged. The waxer had quickly apologised profusely while Kim had in turn blushed crimson as the 'spa treatment bubble' momentarily burst and Kim realised that a complete stranger was about to rip much of the hair around her most intimate area out by its roots. But she was committed by then, so she moved her legs back down just past perpendicular to her pelvis and awaited her fate stoically. More fool her when she was asked 'Would you like us to clean up any odd hairs further back?' and she said 'Why not!', because she wasn't prepared for the indignity of laying on her stomach, pulling her own buttocks apart while a strange woman fiddled around between her akimbo legs with wax strips. Nor was she prepared for the excruciating pain as the rather more hair than she had ever imagined being there in the first place was torn out from round her back passage, high pain threshold or not.

By the time it was finished, though, and Kim looked at the 'before and after' pictures, the 'spa treatment bubble' had formed around her again, and she was quite taken with her new, smaller, tidier and most shockingly, heart-shaped bush. Which would be her little secret, from everybody. Forever. Full stop.

From there, it was another shower, and then straight into an all over mud bath, where Kim spent half an hour immersed to the neck in an oversized portable bath-tub of warm, gloopy, mineral rich mud that was wheeled in to the suite, with slices of cucumber over her eyes and head slathered in still more of the odiferous gloop. 'This one is for you, Shego...' thought Kim, as she descended into sombre contemplation of the awful fate that had befallen woman who she had never thought well of, had even tried to kill (although she now bitterly regretted it), but who she had always regarded with healthy respect as an opponent. Only now that it was too late, had Kim come to understand Shego a little better, and also realise that she must have thought more highly of Shego than she was ever aware of at the time.

In due course, a couple of very well built women who looked like they might once have been Olympic shot-putters came and wheeled the tub straight up to the door of the shower and hauled Kim bodily upright out of the cloying and now cooling mud by her arms, then scrubbed her clean from head to toe in very no-nonsense fashion. Once the last trace of mud had spiralled away down the plug-hole, they turned off the water and swapped the shower heads for towels before towelling her dry with equal brusqueness.

By now, fully inside the 'spa treatment bubble', Kim was becoming slightly blasé about being naked in front of complete strangers. By the time she emerged from the shower, the mobile mud bath had gone, presumably in the care of the two muscle-bound ladies, and the luxuriously comfortable robe she had worn earlier hung on a hook outside the shower room. On the small table next to the bench where the Kimunicator lay, privacy mode engaged and camera firmly face down, a menu, cutlery and a place mat had been laid, along with a rose in a glass. Kim was shocked, and checked the time on the Kimunicator - how was it lunchtime already, given that she had started so early this morning? She realised that she now was a little hungry, but nothing that the light salad and mineral water she ordered from a spa attendant who appeared right on cue wouldn't fix.

Again it was no run of the mill salad, although a slice of cucumber is still a slice of cucumber, however skilfully it has been carved into an intricate shape. But Kim went from the sublime to the ridiculous, following the 'healthy choice' light salad, with the height of decadence in sweet courses, as she enjoyed a bowl of chilled frosted strawberries, which she individually dipped into a jug of fresh whipped cream, all while reclining in the suite's Jacuzzi.

Bliss.

When she was eventually invited to climb out of the Jacuzzi, the fluffy bath robe had gone, replaced again by one of the tiny towels, and the massage 'treatments' started. One after another, separated by sauna sessions or pauses to relax in the Jacuzzi. Kim doubted that many of them were anything more than complete flim-flam, but they were all pleasant enough experiences despite that. There was a Reiki massage, a Shiatsu session, a session with an unpronounceable name where the therapist kept talking about 'unblocking her chakras' and a hot stone massage, each more relaxing than the last, although all of them a little hokey to a greater or lesser extent. But the last one was the best of them all so far, half an hour of glorious deep tissue aromatherapy massage.

oOo

Kim yawned, contentedly. Apparently, proper relaxation was utterly exhausting. She glanced down at her right bicep, and was surprised to see that for all that the 'treatments' she had just experienced were clearly outrageous quackery, the angry bruise she had been sporting for a couple of days, courtesy of Hiro Kung in the Global Justice training dojo, had faded significantly, and upon a bit of exploratory prodding, was less painful to the touch.

She knew one thing now, as well. Miss Chang wasn't the only stunningly beautiful woman who had laid hands on her today, but she was surely the most beautiful, and the massage she had just given Kim with the aromatherapy oil had been the most sensual massage experience she had ever had. And yet... she had experienced not even a tiny flicker of arousal. If she was a closet lesbian, she was hiding it from herself very well!

That thing with Shego the other day... that must just have been some kind of weird aberration.

Kim found herself inadvertently thinking about her late nemesis for a second. She remembered the fighting mostly, and fantasised about Shego snarling at her and leaping in to attack her full bore as Kim taunted her with the whole 'I spent the day at the 'Billionaires Retreat' deal...

...and for the first time all day, she felt a tiny but still unwelcome echo of a bloom of tingly heat in her groin as she remembered the raw desperate abandon of full bodied combat with Shego...

"NO!" she admonished herself, jumping up sharply and stomping over to the Jacuzzi. Stepping in, she slumped down in one of the seats, while forcing herself to think about mundanities. And definitely not Shego. Or the fact that if the only thing that turned her on was going head to head in life or death combat with a truly worthy opponent, her love life was always going to be... complicated. To say the least. Dear Dr Ruth...

She slumped further in the Jacuzzi... until suddenly a jet of warm water blasted her squarely in the crotch. She yelped, and quickly shuffled away from the unwanted stimulus, paranoid that what had happened the other day might happen again. Her rational mind told her it wasn't anything she need worry about; she hadn't just spent a day and a half fighting skilled martial artists, and she hadn't known then that Shego was almost certainly dead, either. But she was thinking about Shego again in an awkweird fashion, she realised. 'Must stop doing that!' she told herself . She made an effort to clear her mind entirely, and when that failed, to think about something entirely different. Kim chose to focus on where it had all begun. And why. Mrs Mulberry's Ballet Academy had an awful lot to answer for...

oOo

In London there is a man who, despite being severely autistic, can be shown a mere glimpse of an entire cityscape, and then accurately draw it in its entirety over several days, including every one of thousands of buildings in their correct locations, with the correct number of floors and windows on each floor. This is something that no 'normal' person can do. In Moscow, there is a blind man with a reading age of 7 and a severely limited intellect, who, given a piano, can perfectly recreate at will any performance by any of the world's greatest pianists, having heard it just the once. Again, this is beyond the capabilities of almost all of humanity. These incredibly rare and gifted people are more commonly known as 'savants', and their superhuman abilities seem to be a consequence of their brains being wired up entirely differently. Most of them suffer for the fact that their superhuman innate capability is balanced by an even more significant disability. A particularly crass, insensitive and narrow minded commentator might say that they 'came out wrong'.

Kim definitely 'came out wrong'. Kim had recently remarked, referring to the tweebs, that 'This is what happens when a rocket scientist and a brain surgeon reproduce'. Indeed, when two people with intellects in the 99.9th percentile have children together, you'd expect them to be intellectually gifted to an astonishing degree. The tweebs were doing differential calculus for fun before they were out of Pre-K. For Kim to be merely 'quite bright' was definitely a surprise to her parents. Oh sure, her standardised IQ tests put her up there on or about the 85th percentile, but she was definitely slow-witted for a Possible. But on the other hand, according to her mother, she was crawling at 10 weeks old and walking at less than 6 months, which should have been a biological impossibility. By 9 months she was climbing up the curtains to get a closer look at the ceiling and by the time she was three she was tightrope-walking on the banister rail for fun. By four years old, her poor mother was run utterly ragged. Kim seemed to have boundless energy and no healthy way to expend it, compounded by a penchant for blithely taking what appeared to be the most horrific risks. One day Anne drove home from the hospital to discover the child minder outside in the garden tearing her hair out as Kim balanced on one leg on top of the chimney pot on the roof of the house and bouncing up and down. For fun. Nobody could work out how she could possibly have got up there, let alone how to get her down. While Ann was ageing ten years on the front driveway, Kim aged her another decade by seeing her and leaping off the chimney pot and sliding down the roof at the back of the house then apparently off the edge, two stories above the ground. She was still standing transfixed with shock when Kim ran round the side of the house and said 'Hello mummy!' . When an increasingly desperate Anne saw an advertisement in the classified section of the Middleton Bugle for a ballet class for tots, she decided to take Kim along and see how she took to it.

What happened next caused something of a stir.

Mrs Mulberry was formerly a leading light of the Middleton Amateur Ballet company, and perfectly qualified to introduce very small children, mostly girls, to ballet dancing. When her left hip had finally called time on her own modest ballet dancing dreams, and with her own children having grown well past the cute stage, she had decided to try to combine sharing her love of the art of ballet with her love of small children, and to earn a few extra bucks in the process, by starting a ballet class for the tots she found most adorable at the old Middleton temperance hall. She had been running her classes for around 6 months when Anne Possible first brought little Kimmy along to join in.

At first none of the exercises, aimed at 4-6 year olds, seemed remotely interesting to young Kim. She seemed able to assume the basic positions that Mrs Mulberry demonstrated to her class of tots during her first session with perfect ease and grace, first time every time, without any help or guidance, obviously fairly bored, and so she expressed surprise when Anne remarked later that Kim had never taken any kind of ballet class before. But it was when Mrs Mulberry played a grainy video of the Bolshoi performing Swan Lake to her class (to inspire them, and also to give her creaking hip a bit of respite), that Kim was apparently utterly transfixed. Afterwards she persuaded her mother to try to borrow the tape from Mrs Mulberry. That evening before bed she watched the tape just twice more, and then went to bed a happy 4 year old. The next day she attempted to dance Odette's solo in the back garden. And anybody watching would have been utterly amazed. But little 4 year old Kim was apparently frustrated by her physical inability to emulate precisely the physicality of Natalia Bessmertova, prima ballerina of the Bolshoi, who of course had by then spent a lifetime dedicated to honing both her craft and her body as well as her artistic skills. But undaunted, and with no prompting, little Kimmie apparently knew exactly what she needed to do. She devised a training program for herself that would enable her to match Bessmertova's performance perfectly.

Anne had no idea what she and Mrs Mulberry had started. She only knew that for the next four weeks, little Kimmie had stopped climbing trees and swinging from high branches, and the latest child minder had stopped taking Valium. In truth, if she had known that little Kimmie was training herself to the pitch of a prima ballerina at 4 years old, then as a doctor she would have been even more stressed and anxious. But ignorance is bliss. Fortunately for her, little Kim the savant was perfectly aware of her own body to a level that no other human being could be. She understood every muscle and every fibre in a way that no sports scientist, bio-mechanist or radiographer ever could. She instinctively knew how to make it do exactly what she wanted it to do, including get stronger, without doing any damage to it. She knew what foods to eat, in what quantities, and what to avoid, although she couldn't yet properly articulate her desires. She knew that fine line between optimal training and over-training, not only holistically, but at the level of each individual muscle, sinew, tendon and ligament. And yet she knew these things at a purely instinctive level, because at 4 years old she barely had any concept of muscles and bones, or fitness come to that. And of course, it never remotely occurred to her that she was in any way different to anybody else. She just wanted to dance exactly like the pretty lady on the TV.

Anne was called in to work to deal with a burst aneurism the following weekend, so she didn't get to take little Kimmie to her ballet class, but the following Saturday Anne was free and returned with Kimmie, the borrowed video and an apology for the delay in returning it. 'Oh no, don't worry, please…' said Mrs Mulberry to Anne, dismissively. "It's just wonderful to see so much enthusiasm for ballet in a child!". Then turning to little Kim she asked "Did you like it?". "Yes, thank you Mrs Mulberry! I'm learning to dance just like the lady in the video! Look, I can do…" babbled Kim excitedly . "Oh really! I'd really like to see that, Kim! Maybe later you can show me!" said Mrs Mulberry, humouring the child.

And that was it, until the end of the class. Anne spent the next 45 minutes reading the current issue of The Neuroscience Review, while little Kimmie looked bored as she went through 'First position', 'Second position…' etc. Only at the end of the class, as the parent were milling around gathering their charges, did Kim say "Can I show you now Mrs Mulberry? Pleeeese!".

"Oh go on then, Kim. Just there, I'll be watching!" said Mrs Mulberry, apparently expecting to be able to have a little light chit-chat with Mrs Dr Possible while Kim cavorted around the temperance hall in an uncoordinated fashion that bore no relation to any kind of dance, let alone ballet.

Instead, she found herself standing alongside Anne and watching transfixed, their mouths hanging open in amazement, as a 4 year old danced what appeared to her to be a perfect rendition of Odette's solo from Swan Lake. She finished in almost complete silence, her mother, Mrs Mulberry and those parents who hadn't yet made it out the door all standing and staring in slack jawed amazement, and then skipped over to Mrs Mulberry and her mother and said 'It's not right yet. I can't do this…', Kim assumed a position on the point of her left ballet pump and raised her right leg past her ear, 'for long enough yet. And…'. "Where did you learn to do that?" asked a shocked Mrs Mulberry, interrupting her. Anne obviously wanted to know the same thing. "I watched the tape you lent my mommy!" said Kim, simply.

Mrs Doctor Possible and Mrs Mulberry looked at each other. Then they looked at Kim. Then they looked at each other. Then Mrs Mulberry said "Kim… if I put the video here in the player and turn the sound up, could you do that again to the music?"

"Yes! Yes! Yes!" said Kim, bouncing up and down with unrepressed excitement.

A week later, and with a week more of her self-generated physical training program, Kim's interpretation of Odette's solo from Swan Lake was, by any objective measure, world class. The voluntary artistic director of the Middleton Amateur Ballet, a former professional Corps de Ballet dancer, wept real tears of emotion as 4 year old Kim emulated the greatest ballerina of the modern era in a draughty public hall in Middleton, accompanied by a ghetto blaster. For good measure, having watched another couple of famous ballets and ballerinas on video a couple of times each, she gave two further world class performances. When he asked how long she had been dancing and they had to tell him that her first ballet class had been four weeks earlier, he thought they were joking. Nevertheless, he had taped Kim's extraordinary performances on video and sent the tape to an old buddy of his who now worked for the Metropolitan ballet in New York, with a covering note saying 'Get a load of this kid. It's unbelievable!'. And that had brought a sudden end to Kim's ballet career.

It was the Wednesday of the following week when the offer of a ballet scholarship hit the door mat. Well, three offers. Apparently, second and third generation copies of Kim's impromptu performances had spread around the world of professional ballet like wildfire, and creative directors were clamouring to grab this exceptional new talent for their companies and to hone, or exploit, it further. None of them had even seen Kim dance in the flesh, but they had all shot from the hip. If the family would move to New York, Moscow, London, Kim would have a stellar career ahead of her. But Mr Dr Possible was just leading his first major research project at Middleton Space Centre, and Anne had just been given the nod that she would be chief neurosurgery resident at Middleton hospital within the year. That, and she had just discovered that she was pregnant again. All things that made dropping everything and suddenly becoming itinerant ballet parents completely inconceivable. And she couldn't even consider narrowing her obviously extraordinary daughter's horizons so completely at just 4 years old. So, the next Saturday, when she clipped Kim into her car seat and set off to drive her to ballet class, she had to explain to her that she wouldn't be able to go to ballet class any more after today.

For the first mile of the trip, Kim cried inconsolably. Then she was very quiet for another mile. Finally, she said, in a very quiet voice "Mommy… it wasn't really fun when I'd learnt how to do it. It was only fun when I couldn't!'"

Anne pulled over to the side of the road and then turned to her daughter with surprise. 'What do you mean, Kimmie?'

"Now I can dance like that lady, it's quite boring really. How many dances are there to learn?"

A brief calculation in her head based on how quickly Kim learnt the three solo dances she had already mastered, told her that Kim would have finished with ballet in its entirely and be bored stupid with it within about two months, with only 25 years of dancing ahead of her, if the family had uprooted themselves in pursuit of ballet immortality. And Anne still hadn't worked out how Kim was able to do what she already physically could without having permanently ruined her growing body; she felt vindicated. "Not enough, darling. Not enough!"

She pulled away again, but then a sign caught her eye; 'Shotokan Karate, 2nd Dan Instructor, all ages welcome' had appeared over a previously empty shop-front in the strip-mall they were passing. On a whim, Anne pulled in to the parking lot and stopped. "Kimmie, how would you like to try something a little different? It might be more fun for you than ballet".

"OK, mommy!" said Kim, brightly.

oOo

In due course, Miss Chang returned and hosed Kim clean of any of the aromatherapy oil that wasn't already forming an unappealing scum on top of the water in the Jacuzzi; it was obvious why they left this treatment until last! When she emerged from the shower, she found one of the super-comfortable robes waiting for her, along with the chaise long and half the beauty therapists she had met earlier. They fell on her like a frenzied pack, and within minutes, her hair was conditioned and then pinned and clipped up into a simple arrangement that she could shake out when she was done with it, her face was made up beautifully, her new gel nails were polished to a gleam, and she smelt… expensive. Finally, she was handed the clothes and undies she had walked in wearing, freshly laundered, and pausing only to grab the Kimunicator, she was ushered towards the private elevator that served the 'Dragon Queen Suite'. The entire staff of the Empress Spa lined up in three ranks to wave her goodbye as she left.

It was only as the elevator doors snicked closed between her and the waving drill formation of spa employees that it felt like that 'spa treatment bubble' she had been cocooned in finally went pop; she looked at the Kimunicator and was shocked to see that it was 6pm local time. Had she really just spent an entire day doing absolutely nothing useful? 'Well, wherever Shego is now, I hope she appreciates the gesture!' thought Kim.


	17. You only live Twice

_**Now:**_

Actually, at that precise moment, Shego was 5,374 miles to the East and 33,000 feet above terra-firma, scrolling through recent ECAM alerts looking for anything she needed to actually act on, while the Airbus A340-8000 Flight Operations manual lay open across her knee. She had a chinograph pencil between her teeth, where she had been scrawling the occasional key number in the right hand margin of the Navigational Display screen between the compass rose and the edge of the display. Several charts lay on the Captain's tray table in front of her, held in place by a bottle of water; on top was the approach chart for Hong Kong, partially visible below it was the en-route chart for China. A plaintive, faint and intermittent knocking could be heard from somewhere behind her, in the direction of the hijack-proof cockpit door. Draped across the empty co-pilots seat next to her was a voluminous full black Burkha, and a pair of long white silk gloves, and then behind the seat an expensive designer case on wheels, while on the jump seat behind her sat a large black leather briefcase. Both cases were emblazoned with the royal crest of the House of Tajiri and the legend 'Diplomatic Bag - Valise Diplomatique' in gold leaf. An occasional metallic 'clink' could be heard from within the open briefcase, whenever the plane hit a small patch of rough air. To her right, a small laptop PC sat on top of the glare shield above the pedestal, angled towards her. It was attached via a USB cable to a small satellite modem, which had a good view of the sky through the cockpit window. The screen of the laptop was awash with numbers, ramp weight figures, fuel burn rate calculations, endurance figures, latitudes, longitudes, flight levels, upper airway identifiers and alternate airports.

Satisfied that the Centralised Aircraft Monitoring System had no relevant bad news for her, beyond annoyingly and pointlessly bitching that air conditioning pack one in cargo hold three had shat its pants and been shut down, Shego turned back to the laptop. She would occasionally flip a page in the flight operations manual with her thumb and scan through it, before typing in a new number, or adjusting an existing one. Occasionally she would grab the wipe-clean white pencil from between her teeth and scribble a new aide-memoir on the glass cockpit screen, and a couple of times she pushed buttons on the MCDU to pull up different pieces of information from the plane's integrated flight management system, which she also tapped into the laptop.

Eventually she was satisfied, and when she hit 'Calculate' she got a satisfying 'Ding' from the laptop. Pleased with herself, she hit 'File Amended Flight Plan'. A dialogue box appeared. 'Continue, Y or N?'. 'Not yet', she thought. 'Not yet!'. Still, the more go-juice the better, she thought. She reached for the control box on the voice synthesiser and switched it on, checking that it had the 'Profile A' LED illuminated, and then said 'Testing, testing' very quietly. Which she heard as a masculine sounding voice with an Arab accent. Then she pushed the transmit button on her side-stick. "Good evening Euro control, this is Tajiri Royal Two, as salaam alaikum, requesting flight level four-zero-five for reasons of fuel economy, inshallah, over…".

A voice crackled in her headphones in response "Good evening Tajiri Royal Two, this is Eurocontrol. I can give you flight level three-niner-zero if that would assist, over".

"Euro control, Tajiri Royal Two, yes please, three-niner-zero, over!" replied Shego.

"Roger, Tajiri Royal Two, climb flight level three-niner-zero at your discretion, over!" came the reply through her cans.

"Euro control, Tajiri Royal Two, Roger, climbing flight-level three-niner-zero, thank you and goodnight!" responded Shego, prodding the new flight level into the Flight Control Unit, listening for the four engines spooling up slightly in response, and checking that the plane was responding as she expected.

As soon as the Airbus was established at its new altitude, she slid the commander's chair back on its rails, tucked her hands behind her head, closed her eyes momentarily and exhaled deeply. The upper airway junction she was waiting for was half an hour down-route, and to give it time to transmit the data, she would need to activate her retrospective revised flight-plan filing hack at least ten minutes before that. Fifteen to be safe. So, quarter of an hour to fill. She selected the Standby radio frequency, dialled up the BBC World Service on Short Wave, and then reached across her body with her right arm to turn up the cockpit speaker volume. And painfully hit the limits of the shoulder belts. She swore, volubly. She was healing remarkably well, given the state she'd been in a week earlier. But healing was the operative word, not healed. Not quite yet.

The pain subsided to a a dull ache again and she momentarily switched off the World Service and picked up the PA microphone. Just in time before she spoke to the cabin, she remembered the voice synthesiser unit and turned it off. Then she keyed the microphone and spoke in Arabic. "This is Sheikha Mustaffa. Please stop with the banging and clattering on the door. You have every luxury you can imagine back there, and normally you have to sit up here with all the knobs and the buttons and the other stuff I as a mere woman don't understand. You should relax and enjoy the flight. I certainly am. Watch a movie. Have the chef cook you a decent meal for once. Play cards. Raid the oil minister's secret stash of whisky that he keeps at the back of the wardrobe in his state bedroom. If I'm going to fly us all into a mountain, then banging on that door for five hours won't make it any less likely. It will just make me cranky. So sit back and enjoy the ride!"

The banging stopped. Shego smirked. She'd got all of the crew, including the flight crew, to assemble in the rear state room for her to speak to them as the favourite wife of the oil minister and only passenger on this trip, and then she'd simply walked into the cockpit and slammed the door behind her. There were a tense couple of moments while she found the breakers for the on-board satellite phones and internet connection and popped them, but that and the GSM jammer she had left in the drawer of the desk in her stateroom had ensured that all frantic attempts by the crew to contact anybody and warn them that the Oil Ministers favourite wife had gone insane and thought she could fly her own plane were doomed. By the time they realised this, Shego was 5,000 feet into the climb away from Dasqba Military Airbase and it was all far too late for them to do anything except live with it. In a culture so misogynistic that women aren't allowed to drive cars, she found their discomfiture quite amusing.

Shego switched off the PA and turned on the World Service again. It was news time in a couple of minutes and she did just want to check that she was still definitely dead...

oOo

**_24 hours earlier:_**

Sheikh Mustaffa had had more than enough sex, whisky and cocaine to last him… well a few hours at least. Since he had heard of Shego's death he had been frantically making up for lost time with one hand, hence the 12 year old girl he was enjoying breaking in at the moment, and simultaneously trying to make sure his own time didn't run out entirely in just under a week on the other. To which end, he needed to make a secure phone call to the contractor he had hired in order to get confirmation that the first payment had been received and that the Emir would shortly be experiencing a severe shortage of breath. Even the down-payment was an eye watering amount of money, but he needed the best , and he couldn't spend any money at all if the Emir found out what he had been up to and had him killed first. And the Emir didn't 'do' quick painless deaths for those who crossed him, either.

He reached the office, in the basement of his summer palace, and checked the top of the line multi-dimensional security system for any sign of breaches that might indicate that bugs could have been planted since the last security sweep. Then he used the iris and fingerprint recognition system to gain access through the armoured sliding door. Once inside, the door swished shut behind him, and he flicked the light switch.

Nothing happened.

A cold clammy hand gripped his soul.

"Sh…. Shego?", he said in a very small voice.

Total silence was the only reply. He only realised that he had been holding his breath when he exhaled in relief. Stupid fool that he was. It was just a blown bulb. Or a tripped breaker. Shego was dead. He walked over to his desk, to switch on the desk lamp.

He never made it. The moment the room was illuminated by a ghostly green glow, he froze in terror.

"Hello, Saieed!", she said, spitting his name out with real venom. "Guess who!".

Sheikh Mustaffa realised that his bladder had just emptied itself down his leg. He still couldn't move. Finally his mouth unfroze and he said… "Sh.. Shego. I heard you were dead!".

"Yes, that's the rumour. Which must explain why there's a child downstairs? Because you remember what I told you I would do to you if I ever caught even a suspicion of you with an underage girl again?"

"Shego, I can explain…"

"Remind me what I said. "

"Shego, I thought…"

"REMIND ME!", she yelled, angrily.

The Sheikh squealed and stammered "Y.. You said you would tear off my c… cock and balls, cook them in front of me in your hand and then jam them down my throat until I choked to death on them. "

"Oh yes… that was it. Oh well, at least you can't claim that this is going to come as a surprise…"

"Shego, no, oh god no, I'm sorry, I'm weak, I can't help myself, I thought I was going to die in a week's time anyway…", gibbered a terror-struck Sheikh Mustaffa.

"Actually, I've just remembered why I'm here. I need you alive for the next couple of hours or so, so as much pleasure as it would give me to kill you where you stand, you corrupt offspring of a whore and a diseased camel, you will live at least the rest of this day. And maybe even a little longer. Provided you do right by her now. Tell me her name."

"I… do not know. Some Pakistani peasant girl for sale by her parents to the highest bidder. I have her name on my desk."

There was a click and the lights came on.

"OK, go and look. And then phone your private secretary. She is to be taken to the harem, cleaned up, dressed, and then straight onto a plane to England and into the same private girls school that the girls I rescued from your depraved predation two years ago went to. She needs to be on a plane before midnight, or you'll be eating your own meat at one minute past, do you understand? "

"It is done, Shego! It is done!" he babbled, practically running to his desk and sitting down, before composing himself for a few seconds and picking up the phone.

All the while he was speaking, Shego stared at him with naked contempt. When he had finished, he put the phone down. "It is done. She will be in a car on the way to the airport within 20 minutes".

"Next time you hear a rumour that I'm dead, remember this moment. If I didn't have need of you right now, you would currently be eating your last meal. A small one."

Now that he believed he had cheated death, the Sheikh was recovering some of his swagger and bravado, aided by the two lines of finest Columbian marching powder he had snorted not 30 minutes earlier. "I'm guessing that you want to stay dead, Shego. I heard that the Americans had killed you, and that they are offering a very large reward for information leading to your corpse. Perhaps I should give them a call?"

"Unless they are paying over 1.94 trillion US dollars, which I very much doubt, I'm not sure that would be very profitable for you. I hope you haven't forgotten that if anything happens to me, two weeks later you stop getting your regular eight-figure refunds, and the rest of the money still in the pot I… borrowed… from you gets distributed between my favourite charities, and to put out a very very large contract indeed on you. Oh, and if you remember, that dossier detailing your fraud goes to the Emir and to the world's press. And since the only chance the Emir, who makes you look like a boy scout, has of recovering any of that two and a half trillion US dollars you embezzled from the state oil company, meaning from him, is to kill you himself before every professional mechanic in the world gets to you, I'm not betting on you surviving anything bad happening to me for very long at all. Unless something bad happens to the Emir at about the same time. Then maybe… just... maybe... you can buy out the contract and save your own vile stinking skin. So… do you feel lucky?"

He didn't feel very lucky at all.

"Right. As you have observed, I am dead, and I want to stay that way. Which is why your favourite wife wishes to buy a new pair of shoes tomorrow. In Vancouver, Canada. She wishes to fly there alone aboard your flying palace, on an Emirate of Tajiristan diplomatic passport, and under letters of protection as a diplomatic courier."

"Vancouver?"

"That's what I said. I need to see a man about a dog. A very private dog."

"Well…"

"Shall we say take-off from Dasqba tomorrow at 15:00 local? I trust that all the necessary documents will be waiting for me, the crew briefed and a proper flight plan filed? I'd hate to have to come back here for anything. If I do, I might remember to feed you your own genitals after all!"

He put his head in his hands and closed his eyes. "Yes… yes… YES, Shego. Alright. It shall be as you ask.".

There was no reply.

When he looked up, the green skinned woman with the flaming hands had simply vanished. How the hell had she done that? Where had she gone? He jumped up from behind the desk and ran around the room frantically, looking behind furniture and flipping up rugs, but there was no sign of her, and there were no logs on the security system to indicate that she had had any more trouble getting out unseen than she had getting in. If he didn't have a clammy leg and a smell of urine hanging around him, he would be convincing himself that he had imagined the whole event. But he knew he hadn't.

He went back behind his desk and picked up the phone. First things first. He selected the ultra-secure line and dialled a number that he had committed to memory, and not written down anywhere. There was an exchange of code words and then he put the phone down. A second later it rang. Another exchange of code words. And then…

"The commercial matter we discussed a few days ago. Trading conditions have altered significantly and the contract is terminated immediately. It must not proceed under any circumstances." said the Sheikh, cryptically.

"There are certain costs associated. Resources committed. Expenditures made." said a sinister sounding voice from the other end of the secure line. "Which is why you can retain the down-payment. Which is a lot more than the 20% cancellation fee that I believe is standard in these kinds of contract negotiations", replied the Sheikh.

"I was thinking more of 50%" said the disembodied voice. "I'm sure that there is somebody out there who would reimburse us our costs in exchange for the details of the original… transaction… that you contracted. I hear that the Emir is quite wealthy, perhaps he will offer?"

"If you sell me out to the Emir, your professional reputation will henceforth be lower than whale excrement, but nobody will care because the Emir will kill you very slowly and painfully for taking a contract on his life in the first place" admonished the Sheikh. "You were being paid a big premium because of the risk if anything went wrong. No hit, no risk. 33% is all there is and it is more than generous. Especially since when I eventually do re-let that contract, and I have every reason to doubt that I'll have to wait very long before… trading conditions change again in your favour, we can do another similar deal."

There was a pause and then the sinister voice said "OK. Done."

"Thank you. And now I have another job for you. This one is just bread and butter work, and you can invoice me in the usual way at the usual rate. I need you to put a full top drawer surveillance team on the ground in Vancouver, Canada. They are to follow the Sheikha Mustaffa covertly during her visit there which starts the day after tomorrow and report back to me on who she sees and where she goes, what she does. Treat her as highly surveillance aware, because I really don't want her knowing that she was followed. But whatever you find, you report only to me! If you gather any… exceptional... information that you consider particularly valuable, I personally get first chance to buy at exactly twice the going rate for that information. Nobody else. Understand? "

"Understood. There will be a premium for pulling together a suitably high quality and trustworthy surveillance team at such short notice and positioning it in time to expedite."

"Yes, yes, agreed!", said the Sheikh, testily.

"Excellent. Goodnight Saieed! I will be in touch.", and with that he put the phone down.

The sheikh did likewise. And then he put his head back in his hands and sighed.

oOo

A mile away, Shego was walking, with a slight limp, into the vast empty desert, alone in the pitch dark, towards her impromptu camp site. In her hand was a large and very expensive designer suitcase, empty but for a leather briefcase, a bhurka, a pair of long white silk gloves, a giant bottle of chilled water liberated from the odious oil minister's refrigerator, and a slab of very fine steak that she would be grilling by hand (literally) in due course. On her face was a smirk. The ear bud she was wearing relayed the telephone conversations captured by the bug Shego had fitted to the telephone on Saieed Mustaffa's desk perfectly. And she'd bet absolutely right about him three ways now. A vile excrescence upon the face of humanity he may be, but a useful one. And utterly predictable. The good his money had done so far outweighed his own parochial hedonistic evil, however offensive it was. And of course, when the chips were really down, and the chips were really down now, he gave Shego an ultra-deep cover secret identity that could, once in a while, get her anywhere in the world, anytime, completely incognito. Well… until she burned the Sheikha's legend. Which she would try not to do on this trip, if she could help it… could be tricky, though...

oOo

_**A further 24 hours earlier:**_

He didn't understand what he had done to get this posting. He had pissed somebody off. Or maybe his grandfather had pissed somebody else's grandfather off. 'Border guard', was Mustapha's alleged job. But this border needed no guarding. The 'post' consisted of the remnants of an old French colonial desert block house, but the original roof, and half of the front wall with the doorway, had long ago given up the unequal fight with the ravages of the desert. Along with all bar one small pane of glass in just one of the two small windows. The 'roof' now, such as it was, consisted of rusty corrugated iron that rattled and banged every time there was a gust of wind, and it had been patched again with an abandoned sand ladder that somebody had found from a competitor in the rally raid races that used to come this way in the days before the last border war. Actually… he looked at the long faded bullet pock marks in the façade… perhaps it hadn't been only the desert that had ruined this 'border post' so comprehensively.

He wiped his sweat-soaked brow with his stinking kepi and then replaced it on his head, and hefted his rifle sling to his other shoulder. It was pointless to carry it. Not only did this border not need guarding, but he only had one magazine and he had no idea if the thing even would fire. He'd had just one go on the firing range at training camp, where they had given him five live bullets to fire, and he still had no idea whether he had hit anything. But if he wasn't carrying it or wearing full uniform, what was left of it, when the sergeant came and inspected the post, he would be fined a month of pay. And given how little he was paid, and how his family back home still suffered despite the little he could provide, he daren't risk it. Not that the Sergeant had been up here for many months. Who would come here of their own free will?

He turned slowly through 360 degrees and looked to the horizon. In the distance was the rusty old barbed wire fence that marked the border. It was choked with sand in places, broken in others, but nobody on this side could get anywhere near it to repair it, even if they had wanted to. You'd have to be pretty brave to trust that there were no mines hidden even on the other side, to be honest. The mines were everywhere. Nobody knew how many, nobody knew what kind, nobody knew which side had planted them all, let alone where. Probably both, at various times. They stretched to the horizon to his left and right, occasionally poking above the sand, normally just below the surface, and sometimes they would sink deep into the sand and then rise up again years later to surprise the unwary in places they had previously thought safe . Occasionally camels wandered across the broken fence and several would go off at once, in sympathy with each other. And then the air would be sweet and foul with the smell of death and rotting meat for the rest of the day. Often the vultures who came to deal with the carcass would set off more mines themselves, but eventually the bones would be picked clean. Until the next camel. Or goat.

Behind him the mines also stretched as far as he could see. There was another fence, slightly better maintained, out of sight in the distance. It butted up against the village, so they had more reason to keep care of it, to save their livestock. A winding single track cleared safe path marked by stakes ran all the way from behind the post to the village, and every day a child from the village would come up to the post to sell them bread and goats milk. If he didn't come, they didn't eat. They barely ate anyway. Last year the child had made a mistake and strayed from the path. They didn't find all of him, and they couldn't collect that before the vultures picked the bones clean, because of the mines. Now, his brother comes instead.

Behind the block house was the well, an old French construction which still provided them with water enough to drink, though it wasn't the sweetest water he had ever tasted. Without the well, this place would be uninhabitable. There was also a stinking hole in the ground, which Mustapha knew was far too close to the well. But they couldn't dig a new pit further away, because of the mines. There was no privacy, but who needed privacy out here? Privacy from whom?

Also there was no paper. But that didn't matter because one thing they did get was a regular delivery of forms for immigration purposes. Forms and rubber stamps and ribbons for the old type writer. The last person to enter the country via THIS border post had come through before he was born.

It was almost the end of his turn outside the hut, he decided. There was no watch, but he had become pretty good at telling the time from just looking at the sun. There was a home-made sun dial beside the post which was slightly more accurate, but his internal clock worked pretty well. The cheap digital watch that Ahkmed, his comrade in misery, had treasured so much had given up the ghost 6 months before. Battery.

He unshipped his water bottle and took a last swig of the slightly brackish, warm well water. As he did so, he was looking out over the border in absent minded fashion, when he noticed a dust devil in the very far distance in the heat haze. As he put his water bottle away, he realised that it was coming closer. And it was moving really fast! Really really fast! He paused to watch it, and realised it was coming straight towards him, all be it still far away on the other side of the border. "Hey, Ahkmed", he called, not very loudly… "Look at this!". It was the most interesting thing that he had seen for three days. Ahkmed was obviously much happier dozing in the hot shade of the hut, though.

The dust devil continued to approach at incredible speed. Faster than he had ever seen one move before. It was huge, and it was tossing giant welts of sand skywards behind it as it rampaged towards a section of the barbed wire border fence that was still quite tall, in front of a low sand-dune on the other side of the border.

"Hey! Ahkmed, Ahkmed!" he called excitedly now, "LOOK!".

A querulous grunt emanated from the hut.

"LOOK! LOOK!".

Just at that moment, the top of the dune on the far side of the border fence exploded in a geyser of soft sand. And then there was nothing for a few seconds, and Mustapha's face fell. Ahkmed would think he was winding him up. Then suddenly there was another geyser of sand on THIS side of the fence. The dust devil had touched down again and it was still heading to go right past the post! Half a second later there was a massive explosion, just behind it. Mustapha heard Ahkmed swear loudly and start to scramble out of the hut, just in time to see a second and a third massive explosion, again just in the wake of the dust devil, which was moving at terrifying speed, faster than he could ever remember seeing anything move before, and it would be on him in seconds. And there was no wind. How could this be? Unless it was some kind of dust monster or…

Quickly and shakily he unslung his rifle and tried to aim it at.. What? There was nothing there! There was another pair of huge explosions not 100 yards away now, and he could hear a terrifying high pitched whining noise, and a sound like a truck riding potholes in the road as he desperately pulled the trigger of his rifle while waving it in the direction of the approaching… sand ghost! Nothing happened! Then the whistle turned momentarily to a roar, he felt the air being moved aside, and a sound like... 'Music?', as he threw himself to the floor in terror, a fortunate decision because a pair of big mines not 50 feet away from him chose that moment to explode, showering him in sand and the roof of the hut with pieces of shrapnel. He heard that last pane of valiant window glass shatter. And then it was heading away, followed by more explosions, as the whistle receded, and Mustapha remembered that he had to actually cock the rifle before it would fire. He pulled the cocking handle to the rear, but with the magazine and the working parts full of sand and grit, it wouldn't go all the way forwards again. Or back either. Useless thing!

Within a few more seconds, the explosions had receded and everything was as it had been. Well almost… a line of still smoking craters, big and small, led from the border fence, right past the border post and headed back towards the village as far as he could see. His ears were still ringing from the two closest big explosions.

He looked around for Ahkmed, who was nowhere to be seen. Had the monster got him? He frantically dashed into the post, to find Ahkmed under the small camp bed he had earlier been sleeping on, sobbing hysterically.

Mustapha knew exactly how he felt!

oOo

_**A further 2 days earlier:**_

Monsieur Montgolfier collapsed, red faced, over the handlebars of his bicycle. 'Sacre Bleu!" he exclaimed under his breath. He looked behind him at the hill he had just pedalled up, and waited until his breathing returned to normal. The parcel jammed into the basket in front of him wasn't heavy, but the hill was long, the sun was hot and at 57 years old, he wasn't as spry as he once had been. Normally when he went to the Chateau to tend the gardens, he cycled from his cottage, and that was only a mile away and a very flat ride at that. Today he had cycled down into the village to buy some stamps so he could post a letter to his cousin Bertold, and the post-mistress had ambushed him as soon as he walked in. "Andre", she had said, "You may be able to save my life, or at least the reputation of France Post in this village! Can you help me? I have received a parcel for the Comptesse at the Chateau! It comes all the way from Hong Kong! Normally I would put it on the van that comes out from Bolganville on Fridays, but this parcel is special apparently! It has to be delivered today before 2pm and it has to be signed for! Will you be a darling and deliver it for me and have the Comptesse sign for it? You can pop the signature sheet into the post-box at the top of Robispear Lane, and Alfonse will pick it up and bring it back to me when he does his rounds tomorrow morning first thing! Be a darling!". And then she had blown him a kiss.

He was putty in her hands.

He took a long look round at the glorious patchwork of the finest of French countryside, pausing to enjoy the bird song, and the sounds of contented farm animals, and then he pushed off again and pedalled gently along the lane towards the Chateau. He had been looking after the gardens there for five years now, ever since the Comptesse had bought the derelict shell of the old place, more or less. He had been a commercial grower, working in big greenhouses, for many many years, but after his wife had died, he had decided he needed a change. He'd sold up and downshifted out here to the middle of nowhere and he loved the place. He had a little investment income, and a small military pension courtesy of his war service in Algeria many decades before, and the few hundred francs he earned each week from his work at the Chateau ensured that he lived very comfortably these days, despite only working part time. And he was proud of the beautiful gardens he had created there, the neatly cropped lawns, the riot of blooms for all seasons. When he had first started, the whole grounds were completely overgrown. In the first six months, things had got much worse before they got better, as the Comptesse's building contractors swarmed the old building, gutting it and then completely restoring it to its former glory. Better in fact. From the trades he had seen arriving and the fixtures and fittings he had seen delivered, he knew that it was beautiful inside. But then everybody had gone, and taken their detritus with them. A removal van had arrived and deposited some of the Comptesses' furniture, and then that was that. The furniture inside the chateau was all covered in dust sheets, and the place remained empty. It had done ever since. Alfonse Montgolfier was actually paid by the management company that looked after the property for the Comptesse, who he had never actually met. Actually, nobody involved in the project had ever met her; she was a recluse, apparently. Lived in a big house in Paris, or was it Lyon, and never went outside. Some people would say it was a crying shame, a waste of a beautiful house. But Monsieur Montgolfier was in heaven. After four and a half years of having the grounds almost entirely to himself, they were his gardens. He had turned them from rough overgrown wasteland to a beautiful vista of well-tended lawns, raised beds, water features and gazebos. He had built his part outrageously; the management company had been incredibly accommodating. With very few exceptions, whenever he had made creative suggestions, within a few days, after inquiring about costs from him, they had authorised the expenditures and arranged for the necessary materials to be delivered to the front gate for him. It had become a great labour of love for him. He had lost his wife to the ravages of cancer, but his lover was now definitely the garden of Le Chateau Nouvelle de Petis Remander. Not that he would turn down the post-mistress from the village if she ever wanted to curl up on the rug in front of his fire with him!

This made the message he had received the day before yesterday all the more of a shock! The Comptesse would be staying at her chateau for a few days, and while he would still be paid, his presence wouldn't be required for at least the rest of the week. She would apparently send word to him via the management company as to what she thought of his beautiful gardens! It felt a bit like his lover had gone off for a dirty weekend with somebody else!

He arrived outside the giant wrought iron gates and waved his electronic key-card at the reader. Instead of the click as the gates swung open that he was used to, he was rewarded instead by an electronic 'Bleep-Bloop' that said 'Go Away' as eloquently as any sign. Undaunted, he pushed the button on the entry-phone.

Nothing happened for a while. He looked up at the CCTV camera above the gate and was surprised to see that it had swivelled and was looking back at him! He waved cheerily.

Then the reedy voice of an old woman spoke to him from the intercom unit. "Can I help you?"

"Bonjour, ca va. Is this the Comptesse de Aurigny I have the privilege of addressing?" he asked.

"Oui, d'accord! Who is there?" asked the reedy voice.

"It is I, Andre Montgolfier, your gardener!", he said, proudly.

"Ah, Monsieur Montgolfier, your landscaping is exquisite and your horticulture divine. You are to be truly congratulated. But I thought you were told that you were not required to attend this week?" asked the Comptesse, through the little box on the outside of the gate.

"Yes, of course! But I have brought a parcel up from the village for you on my bicycle."

"A parcel? There must be some mistake, Monsieur Montgolfier!"

"No mistake, Madame. It is addressed to you in person, here at the Chateaux. It comes all the way from Hong Kong, and it must be signed for I am afraid. The post-mistress asked me to deliver it for you; she had no other way of getting it to you today!"

There was a long pause. Then the box said "Very well, Monsieur. Please bring it to the front door. "

The front gate clicked open, and then swung smoothly back, and Monsieur Montgolfier lent his bicycle against the wall and plucked the parcel out of the basket, before crunching his way up the long gravel driveway.

When he reached the front door, it opened barely a crack and the reedy voice said "Monsieur, please leave the parcel on the front step just here by the door.

"Of course Madame. But… ", he placed the parcel down and then wrestled with the little plastic envelope until he had torn it open and extracted the triplicate delivery note, "...I am afraid you will need to sign here for it!"

A wrinkled black glove extended from out of the crack in the front door and signalled for the paperwork. He placed it in the outstretched hand and it withdrew into the darkness and the door closed. A little while later, the door opened again, and the hand emerged to offer him the two top sheets of the form, complete with a spidery signature. "Merci, Monsieur Montgolfier, your trouble is much appreciated. Allow me to put an extra twenty euros in your wage packet this week for your effort."

"Madame, it was nothing!", he said. "It is a pleasure to finally meet you!"

"Likewise!", said the Comptesse. "And now I must bid you adieu. I must take my medication. Au Revoir, Monsieur. Have a pleasant afternoon!"

'A frail old recluse', thought Monsieur Montgolfier, as he trudged back down the gravel driveway to retrieve his bicycle. Moments after he swung his leg over it, he heard the gate click closed behind him. He sighed, and pedalled off towards Robispeare Lane to deposit the signature sheet in the old post box.

oOo

The Comptesse de Aurigny watched the cheery gardener pedal away up the lane on his bicycle on the CCTV monitor in the cupboard under the stairs. And then, she spoke aloud, almost absent mindedly.

"Merde! Putain! Ça ma fait chier!"

How had they found her? Who had found her? Not the CIA. If the CIA had found her, the news would be talking about the terrible 'accident' where a US warplane had 'unintentionally' dropped a live bunker buster bomb on a remote French chateau. Somebody else? The Comptesse de Aurigny was one of Shego's best constructed clean-skin sock-puppet identities, with a full, consistent and wholly unbreakable official legend, up to and including detailed medical records going back 50 years, and until yesterday, Shego had never used the legend for any purpose whatsoever, so there was no way she could have blown the gaffe herself. She would have gone as far as saying that the identity was essentially un-crackable. Especially given that she was officially dead, and therefore if anybody was looking for her, it would be at the bottom of the Atlantic, not in rural France. HOW had she been found out? Her 'loyal' handful of little helpers all had _far_ too much to lose to say anything, and they had all been tested almost to destruction before and not found wanting! And why weren't large calibre armour-piercing bullets crashing through the chateau walls already? Had she missed something in her extensive background checks on Monsieur Montgolfier? He'd played a small non-voluntary part in one of France's African colonial wars many decades ago and had got himself slightly wounded for his trouble. But a less likely one man sleeper cell it would be hard to find! And for who, anyway? Why? How big a bang would that parcel make when she opened it?

She sighed. She stood up slowly with a terrible groan, and hobbled over to a very nice Queen Anne sideboard with a very heavy and very solid base. Crouching down on her haunches, she groaned again, more loudly, and swore under her breath. Never mind playing the part of a frail old lady, she was doing some pretty good method acting here, she reflected. And then she fired up the index finger plasma cutter and cut through both the plywood floor of the sideboard, and the mild steel sheet beneath, until she could remove the entire metal top of the welded crate concealed in the pedestal, and then extracted a robust briefcase from the smoking sideboard. Then, standing up again using the chair back for support, and groaning in pain again, she placed it on the top of the antique walnut curio, and flipped open the catches. A small portable X-ray scanner and a wide selection of other tools of the trade of larceny were revealed.

She was pretty sure that if there was a bomb in the parcel, it wouldn't be on a timer, since it would be tricky to set it so that she was vaporised and not poor old Monsieur Montgolfier. And of course, had her gardener exploded en-route to her, Shego would have been alerted. Similarly a trembler would be a bad idea. A fuse that detonated when X-rayed would be quite a clever wheeze, but Shego had seen Andre the gardener tote it with one hand very easily, so if it was a bomb, it wouldn't be a very big one. And anyway, if somebody knew where she was, and was clever enough to devise a fiendishly complex explosive device to kill her despite reasonable precautions, then there were many easier ways of doing the deed. Somebody on top of the ridge on the far side of the valley with a Barratt could have had a good go at blowing her head off when she answered the door, for example.

Nevertheless, the fact that sending her a parcel bomb would make no sense was no reason for neglecting common sense caution. Selecting an extending feeler probe from the case of tools, and reaching through the crack in the door, she deftly slid the parcel across until it was the other side of the substantial stonework around the door frame, and then she placed herself behind it. Hanging the x-ray scanner on the end of the feeler probe, she switched on and poked it through the gap, and made sure the parcel got a good dose of radiation. Then she withdrew the probe, switched off the scanner, and reached around with the probe again and gave the parcel a good hard prod, just in case the X-rays had enabled a trembler circuit. Nothing happened. But there was still the possibility of an x-ray initiated timer, so she closed the door and hobbled to the kitchen to make herself lunch.

Sometime later, having eaten a healthy and very French lunch of bread and smelly cheese, she opened the door slightly wider and quickly hoiked the parcel into the front hall before closing up again.

A quick peruse with the X-ray scanner showed absolutely no wires or detonators. But it did reveal a mystery. The box appeared to contain the faint outline of a rectangular card, with an embossed metal design on it that showed up very well on X-ray. It also contained a pair of what looked like bracelets, but with an extra metallic 'strap' attached to them. Shego was satisfied that it was safe to remove the brown paper wrapping, and was rewarded with a smooth, black, one-piece box that rattled and clinked a little when shaken, but to which there was no access whatever. She looked carefully at the X-rays for any hint of a seam or a joint. Nothing. It was one continuously fabricated box seemingly forged or moulded around its contents. She also examined the material of the box itself and noticed that it was laced with cloying synthetic fibres that could well have been designed to frustrate any saw, and bind even the most powerful mechanical cutters. What she was looking at was a one-piece box that nobody could open without destroying, and which cutting open with any kind of saw or angle grinder without destroying the contents would be extremely slow and difficult if it was even possible! But what was it made of?

She had to cut into the floor pedestal of the wardrobe in the spare bedroom to retrieve a flight case containing a portable forensic laboratory in order to try to answer that question. Despite peering through a microscope for an hour at slivers and indeed the surface of the box itself, she was little the wiser. Her attempts to isolate the chemical composition of the material by attacking it with various powerful solvents failed miserably, when even the most powerful acids wouldn't touch it. Oh, she could identify some individual constituents of the material the box was constructed from through the microscope - strands of carbon fibre, for example, but this material was nothing commercially available that she knew of. Without a mass spectrometer to hand she could be no more specific! However, on a hunch, she gave one of the sample slivers a quick hit of the old green magic. It melted just like mild steel. Then she picked up the other sliver she had been examining in a pair of tweezers and held it in the flame of the kitchen gas range. It went with a proper 'Woof!'. Furthermore representative experiments using burning acetylene gas that Shego generated using lumps of calcium carbide and the pressure cooker from her kitchen confirmed that cutting into the box with a gas-axe would result in an embarrassing and destructive self-oxidising fire, but that Shego's plasma could be used to cut into it with impunity. She didn't have any means of generating a traditional electrical plasma arc at her disposable - it wasn't something she would normally have a use for, but she wouldn't have been at all surprised it that also caused the package to self-immolate!

Somebody had gone to extreme lengths to send her a package that only she could easily get inside of without destroying the more flammable contents, and certainly nobody could have opened and re-closed again without her knowledge. Which meant that the sender not only knew that she was alive, not only knew who she was and where she was, not only knew a disturbing amount about her - a lot more than the spooks of the CIA did - but was prepared to take extraordinary measures to keep her secret, while letting her know that they knew. To keep her secret at the moment, of course. Which, given that it was a pretty valuable secret, worth a lot of real cash CIA reward money, didn't reassure her in the slightest. Which in turn, suddenly made whoever had sent her this parcel a slightly higher priority for her than the folk in Langley, Virginia who could wait a little longer for the good news. Once 'people out there' knew she was alive, word would spread like wildfire, and when word spreads, the NSA has ears everywhere. The ideas she was currently kicking about in her head for a truly appropriate and apocalyptic revenge on the CIA required absolutely that she remained officially and irrevocably dead. And whoever sent her this package was a threat to that...

She fired up her index finger, and quickly removed one end of the black box, on the kitchen table, and then slid the contents out on to the oak table top. There was a clatter as an identical pair of sturdy but unadorned hinged bracelets, each with a braided metallic finger strap, landed on the stained hardwood surface, along with an ebony black envelope, which was trimmed with… about US$327 worth of Gold Leaf, at yesterday's closing price, Shego estimated. The single Chinese pictogram on the envelope, roughly translated to something like 'Dragon's Hand' or 'Dragon Fist', as far as Shego could remember. Pictograms were never her strongest linguistic suit. If the parcel claimed to have come from Hong Kong, then nothing so far stood out as contradicting that suggestion.

Patiently, Shego dripped a couple of different re-agents onto the envelope, looking for chemical markers that might warn of contact poisons. Normally such things didn't bother her much, but she figured that somebody who was this far inside her might have a few new tricks up their sleeve and know of something she _wasn't _mostly immune to.

In due course, after taking sensible precautions, Shego finally opened the expensive envelope. To find, once again after some toxicology testing, an invitation to a martial arts tournament, of all things. Addressed to La Comptesse de Aurigny. An invitation that only Shego could likely ever have read! There was also a short beautifully scripted note, in French, tucked into the envelope. It said "Please bring the jewellery with you, Madame, you will require it to be allowed to participate...", and it was signed apparently by Lo Pin himself.

She turned her attention to the bracelets which she had previously ignored. They were entirely unremarkable, if apparently well crafted. The surprising thing was that they had no catch - merely a flat section with mating faces. They were clearly designed to be welded closed! Shego had no idea what purpose they served... unless... a chill ran up her spine, and she examined the surface of the metal more closely, then looked again through her microscope. Finally, she put one of the bracelets on her right wrist, and clipped it closed with a clothes peg. 'Here goes nothing!' she thought, and sparked up a very small flame on the tip of her index finger. Or rather, she didn't. She experienced a sensation that reminded her of touching an electric cattle fence and numbed her finger for a few seconds. Bracelet off, no problem. Bracelet on, and the metalwork was earthing her plasma generating mojo to her body, and she was giving herself a Taser shot every time she tried to spark up a flame. Presumably if she gave it full power while wearing the bracelets, she would fry herself to a crisp Even that damned redhead had only exposed her to about the tenth of the peak electrical energy behind Shego's plasma hands when she had kicked her into that tower!

There was only one explanation. The bracelets were made of Molybdenum Ferrucite. But nobody would make anything out of Molybdenum Ferrucite unless they were doing it to short-circuit Shego's plasma power! How the hell did these people know about that? It was a million to one shot that SHE knew about it! Drakken had had her steal a bunch of moon rocks from the Smithsonian for some ridiculous reason, and she'd picked up a meteorite by mistake ('Doy' - a pointless rock is a pointless rock), a meteorite that happened to be made of Molybdenum Ferrucite, an incredibly rare alloy of Molybdenum and Iron that only occurs in that specific form at temperatures and pressures consistent with exploding planets. Meaning in a very small handful of meteorites. As Shego found out. She was heating the rock to 2,500 degrees centigrade to throw it at the plastic water cooler by the doorway and thus create a huge cloud of superheated steam that would beat back Kim Possible and the one with no pants on, who were pursuing them at the time. While doing this, she inadvertently touched the meteorite on the metal ladder she was climbing while she was powering it up. Next thing she knew she was on the far side of the museum on her head feeling like she'd just stuck her fingers in a plug socket. Half the rock was still welded to her hand, which enabled her to analyse it later, while her hand was healing up. But obviously she wasn't the only one to notice what had happened. Somebody had picked up the other half of that meteorite, and had worked out how to weaponise it. They had also worked out how to smelt Molybdenum Ferrucite without it reforming into an entirely different and useless alloy - something that Shego's own experiments had led her to conclude was likely to prove impossible! But to get the material together to manufacture the two bracelets she was looking at, somebody must have designed and built a whole new industrial process from scratch, and then stolen two thirds to three quarters of the world's Molybdenum Ferrucite meteorites from museums and space institutes, and then smelted them down to make... wow... just 'Wow'!

'OK, I reaaally need to meet these people. They're scaring the shit out of me now!', thought Shego.

She looked at the calendar on the wall, then at the clock, then at the date on the invitation. Then she pulled out a map and started looking at her options for getting to Hong Kong on time without becoming late shortly afterwards. The advantage of attending Lo Pin's tournament, apart from the fact that she would be close to the people who had gone to all this scary trouble to send her an invite and who apparently already knew everything the CIA hadn't even fantasised about knowing, would be that she would be on a tiny island a million miles from everywhere. The disadvantage was that if anybody else discovered she was there, disappearing a tiny island in the middle of a vast ocean is just a button press away. Small puff of smoke on horizon, end of her chance for revenge, or indeed anything else. For getting in to Hong Kong covertly, without even this Lo Pin being able to second guess her, she could only think of one option. The Sheikha Mustaffa _had_ no legend they could break. She lived as a chatel prisoner in the Sheikh's harem in a backwards shithole oil kleptocracy with no public records at all, having supposedly been plucked from an illiterate mountain village nobody had ever heard of in Bangladesh at the age of eight. Crack that legend, Lo Pin! She scrolled her map around to the Middle East and zoomed in on the desert Emirate of Tajiristan...

oOo

An hour later, she was ready to roll. She had extracted her stock emergency caches of clothing, equipment, cash and information from all of the furniture she had had delivered to the house, and had divided them into two piles, that which was coming with her, and that which she would incinerate to charcoal dust in Monsieur Montgolfier's fire pit before she left. She really hoped that the Comptessa's elaborate and difficult to establish legend wasn't burnt, beyond Lo Pin's obvious penetration of it, but if it was, she wanted to leave no trace of her ever having been here behind. She locked up the house again, threw dust sheets back over the furniture, reset the security system to give Monsieur Montgolfier access again, and then hobbled towards the lean-to garage attached to the side of the chateau, unlocked the big rusty padlock and swung the doors open. The garage was ostensibly empty apart from a few pieces of rusty obsolete garden machinery that hadn't apparently been used for half a century or more. There was one clear spot in the garage near the back, quite a long thin spot as it happens.

At least, it was clear until Shego pushed a button on the key-fob that was now hanging round her neck.

A... thing... shimmered into view. It was only here because she had needed somewhere off the grid to keep it. The bastard offspring of a high performance motorcycle and a monster truck, it owed as much to engineering and technological excellence as it did to the extraordinary power of creative and artistic grand larceny. The basic dynamically adjustable chassis and the active variable geometry suspension, along with the massively powerful twin digital electric hub drives, were all courtesy of Motor Ed, who apparently wanted into her green and black catsuit very very badly and had presented her with this motorcycle in an attempt to seal the deal. To be honest, he reaaallly wasn't her type. And she really wasn't that desperate at the time either. Also, the original Nickel Metal Hydride battery pack weighed as much as a small house, compromising the handling and performance severely, and required several days to recharge. Another obvious problem was that the machine was as ugly as sin and stood out like a very standy out thing indeed, which made any attempt at keeping a low profile moot. Nevertheless, it was a good basis for a spare time project. Over the years she had bolted various things onto it as she had acquired them. First to go had been the enormous battery pack, replaced by a much, much smaller and lighter pack made up of an industrial quantity of the incredible power cells that nerdlinger had designed for Kim Possible's walkie talkie thingy, and which she had personally liberated from the first sample quantity shipment which the firm he had licensed the technology to had tried to deliver. For an 80% reduction in battery weight, flat out endurance had now gone up from several hours to several weeks! Indeed she had had to commission Dr D to design and build her some special power control converters to stop the thing melting its traction motors the moment she opened the throttle. A lot of the riding dynamics control software she had re-written or upgraded herself. It had taken her many months and many missteps, bug fixes and a couple of big earth-sky-earth-sky moments but it was pretty good now across all terrain. She knew full well, and it was a source of some frustration to her, that if she'd been as dextrous with the ones and the zeros as little nerdlinger was himself, she'd have done a far better job than she actually had and finished it in about two hours, but then, unlike him, she actually had a life, so she couldn't feel too inadequate about it. A lot of the bodywork was now radar disruptive, infra-red absorptive and high-velocity bullet-proof, and the active aerodynamics were based off research she had liberated from Middleton Space Centre. But the piece de resistance was the stealth cloaking device. Which she had pinched from Dr D when he wasn't looking. Using it reduced endurance by about 50%, which is why a non-descript extension lead snaked away to a power socket on the wall of the garage to keep the power cells topped up, and knocked about 10mph off of top speed, although she had found hanging on at the fully rated 260mph, not to mention avoiding traffic at that speed , to be something of a challenge anyway. But she had two choices now, if she wanted to get to her destination without doing something that would fly red flags all across the world and blow her secret wide open. One was to destroy all those months, years of work in the fire-pit behind the house, and then try to hitch-hike to the Arabian gulf in three days disguised as a hobo, the other was to ride 5,000 miles plus across innumerable international borders, for at least 14 hours a day at an overall average of 110mph or so, on motorways, back roads, goat tracks, a thousand miles of burning desert sand dunes, several mine fields and a number of unbridged rivers, on an invisible motorcycle that she had only ever built as a hobby toy anyway. All while feeling like she had been kicked in the tits by a mule and trampled by a herd of elephants for three weeks solid before she started.

Given the choice, it was a no brainer…

A few minutes later, Shego sat astride the now laden beast, having painfully forced her tortured body into one of her green and black armoured catsuits. The house was secured and sanitised behind her, as she pulled the full-face helmet over her head and plugged it in to the central control system. The head up display sprung into life as the gyros spun up, and she issued a few voice commands to test the command interface. "Auto-NVG mode on! Police Scanner On! Navicomp to track mode! Traffic Information Mode On! Stealth Mode Lock! Ambient Noise Cancelling On".

Various displays in her eye line altered obediently to her commands. She had a 99.8% power reserve in the cells, enough to make this insane trip three times both ways even in stealth mode, even if once was probably more than she would want to do it herself in her current fragile state, and she was as ready as she could be. She reviewed her to do list. 'One - homework. Do some proper untraceable research on this Lo Pin character before I bed down for the night. Two - raw materials. Find a couple of kilos of high quality titanium alloy that nobody will miss for a week or two. Three… oh yeah… ride to the moon and back!'

"Terrain Response Mode Adaptive!" she said, talking to the beast. And then, to herself, with a wry grin, she added "It's 5,317 miles to Dasqba, I have full power cells, half a French loaf and I'm wearing an image intensifier helmet!". Then, to the bike, she said "Bring the noise!". A very loud death metal track filled her head, and she grinned evilly. Then, to herself again… "Hit it!". She gave the throttle a vicious twist, and the traction control warning flashed red at her as a huge wall of gravel spattered the wooden door behind her and the bike snaked under her towards the open gate. A second later, and with a chirp of tortured rubber as she slewed sideways into the lane, she was gone, only a pair of intersecting huge black stripes indicating that she had ever been there. The cloud of dust blew lazily across the beautifully manicured lawns, and vanished into the afternoon haze, and the wrought iron gates clanged shut behind her. And then there was only bird song as Le Chateau Nouvelle de Petis Remander returned to its peaceful slumber…

oOo

_**A further 3 days earlier:**_

She awoke with a start. It was dark, the moon was high, and everything hurt. Jagged rocks and sharp sand dug into ruined and burnt flesh that screamed, locked muscles and strained tendons seared, joints ached. And she was very, very cold. Shivering uncontrollably, laying in a little alcove under the overhanging rock face in a contorted shape, facing the wall. She went to turn her head to look out to sea, and… ooh… that was a mistake! Her head swum, and her neck screamed blue murder, bringing her up short. She rolled her whole body over onto the other side in order to look out to sea and check that there were no vessels in the vicinity that might see her if she showed a light. And that was _really_ a mistake! She actually had to cram her fist quickly into her mouth to stop herself screaming in agony as both the flesh released from contact with the ground, and the flesh that had just been introduced to the rocky foreshore, made known its displeasure. A tear ran down her cheek, and the world swam again. After a few moments she felt able to remove her fist and began mouthing the word "Fuck!" under her breath, repeatedly. But she was able to look out to sea, with the aid of intermittent lighthouse flashes, and determine that there was nothing out there as far as the eye could see. Which, given that she was borderline hypothermic as well as in agony, was quite a good thing. Her next challenge was to roll back again, without screaming out loud. She managed it. Just. And then she fired up her left hand, which seemed to be moving reasonably freely, unlike her right arm that had obviously spent the last several hours contorted under her body, and gave the rocks in her alcove at the bottom of the cliff a good long zap to heat them up. It worked. From shivering uncontrollably, she was now at least warm, the rocks radiating a comforting heat. As she revelled in the temperate microclimate of her rock alcove, of course she now realised that she was thirsty. Very thirsty indeed!

After a little while, she realised she could hear trickling water from further along the cliff. Ideally it would be a stream, but possibly it would be a storm drain or even a sewer. She didn't think at the moment she could afford to be choosy, she was obviously severely dehydrated…

It took her ten minutes to make it to hands and knees, with much muttered profanity and a great deal of pain. She decided that if she could get to the water without standing up, she would have a much better chance of not falling straight over again. Standing up sounded like a problem best approached when she was better hydrated, in any case. So she crawled along the cliff face painfully slowly until the water was trickling onto her back. And then she stopped, and painfully manoeuvred herself and her very painful right arm into a position where she could cup her hands and catch some of the precious liquid.

In due course she had a handful, and then she used her special ability to boil-sterilise it in her cupped hands. Then she drank what little was left. It tasted like nectar. It took her a while, but she eventually got enough water down herself that she felt slightly less acutely dehydrated. She was just starting to realise how starving hungry she was, when a turtle crawled out the surf fifty yards away and shuffled up the beach to lay eggs. She looked like a decent sized meal! And she came with a built in drinking bowl, water for the use of! The only question was, would Shego get to the turtle before the turtle made it back to the sea..?

It was close. Damned close. But Shego won, at the expense of much agony. Roast turtle tastes like chicken, and a turtle shell does indeed make a very handy water sterilisation vessel. Also useful as a wash bowl for getting rid of the worst of the stray turtle gore from her arms, chest and face.

Then, after eating and drinking her fill, back in her warm alcove, and mindful of leaving no trace, she dug a big hole in the sand with her left hand, and buried the wreckage of the unlucky sea turtle, before smoothing the sand over the top and giving it a quick blast to dry it.

'Right...', she thought, 'Now what?'.

She knew she was somewhere in the Cape Verde chain, and she knew she needed to stay dead. The nearer she was in time and space to that exploding plane, the more circumspect she would have to be about doing anything that might raise the slightest suspicion that she might have survived. Which meant getting off this island, and well away from this part of the world, preferably without stealing anything, and certainly without being seen. To be honest, right now, just getting off the beach was going to be a monstrous challenge!

She reckoned it was now a little after midnight, and that meant she still had a few hours of darkness on her side. The fact that she woke up in the same place she had crawled out of the sea meant that she had been lucky enough not to be found or spotted by a passer-by. She couldn't have been that lucky for two whole days, so that meant it was still Tuesday night... or early Wednesday morning to be more accurate. There were a number of places she could theoretically head from here, but she knew that the moment she touched any resources associated with Shego, she'd be blown. If anybody so much as flushed the can in any one of her known or suspected homes, bolt holes or lairs any time in maybe the next month or so, there would be people with cheap suits and automatic weapons waiting outside the door of the shitter before they had finished washing their hands. And that's if they were really lucky. After a few weeks, though, the vultures would be circling and all those people who were shit scared of Shego while she was alive would have plucked up courage to start looting. Which might give Shego a chance to 'liberate' a few of her own more amusing toys, if she thought she needed them. Assuming she was still dead by then.

And not dead dead.

Still, for the foreseeable future at least it was therefore fortunate, and very prescient of her, that Shego had pre-positioned a hatful of deep-cover legends in different parts of the world to give her somewhere, or somebody, to drop off the grid into and lie low in a catastrophic emergency... well, just like this one.

Which one she ended up using depended very much on where she could get to from here without raising any red flags. And she needed to get moving if she was to have a chance of getting the hell out of Dodge before dawn broke.

She used the cliff face, and the power of creative vocal profanity, to slowly and agonisingly haul herself upright for the first time. Her right leg would barely support her, her left leg not at all, every inch of her skin burned and screamed at her and she had to work quite hard to stop herself vomiting her turtle copiously across the beach, as a wave of nausea struck her. Presently, the nausea receded and her vision cleared. She found she could move along the cliff face, using it as a support for her still almost useless left leg, as she painfully hobbled. The cold night air was on the one hand uncomfortably chilly, and on the other soothed her naked and tortured flesh. Clothes wouldn't be a priority just now, partly because stealing them would be a risk, partly because she was hoping not to be seen anyway, and partly because it would be just far too damned painful.

She spotted a piece of robust looking driftwood down by the tide line that looked like it could be fashioned into a workmanlike crutch. The only way down to it was to crawl, and when she made it, cursing and swearing all the way, it was rotten. However, the idea was sound, so she crawled along the tide line until she eventually came upon a large tree bough that looked perfect, even having a fork in it that could go into her armpit! A little brief plasma-fuelled carpentry later, and she was ready for an audition for the role of Long John Silver's long lost green cousin... and she succeeded (in hauling herself upright, slotting the makeshift crutch under her left arm and hobbling down the beach at an almost respectable pace at least, if not at saying 'Arrrrrgh, Jim Lad!')!

Despite the all-consuming pain, and the terrific exertion, Shego grinned evilly to herself as she thought "I'm Baa-aaaaack!".

oOo

_**A further 10 years earlier:**_

It was dark in the club, smoky and incredibly loud, and the irregular bursts of staccato white strobe lighting leant a dangerous, edgy, violent ambience to the place. All of which is why she came here. Some black eye-shadow, black lipstick, a bit of white foundation and something with long sleeves so her arms didn't give her away and she fitted right in. Ripped jeans, clumpy boots, a 'Forever Metal' sweatshirt and a black leather motorcycle jacket were kind of a goth standard, and so was an... odd complexion, so she had a crowd to hide in for the first time in a while. Plus, she liked the mosh-pit, the energy and anarchy of the place. It was a perfect counterpoint to the 'day job', and head-banging the night away incognito was sometimes as good a way as any of dealing with the frustrations and disappointments it regularly inflicted on her.

But not today. Today had been too much. Today had seen her sitting in a Go Foundation trustees meeting while the trustees argued about her underwear. Specifically, which items of underwear The Foundation would fund and provide for her, and which items they would not. So, her detailed written requisitions for a dozen high-tech sports bras and the cotton-lycra briefs were approved, but only because they were black, or green. Other colours would have been rejected. As were the requests for anything with any lace on it, or indeed the two dozen thongs she had ordered, because they didn't meet fire-retardance standards for use 'on the job'. That was the way it now was. Want to go on a $2 million Advanced Fighter Air Combat Tactics school at the US Navy Top Gun academy? No problem, fill your boots, the Go foundation will pay. Want bus fare into town and a mosh pit ticket to see your favourite band at the local college? Not in the charter, go whistle...

She wondered how many other 16 year old girls had their underwear preferences picked over and second guessed by committees of disapproving senior lawyers and accountants? Not many she guessed. And not many of the few unfortunate 16 year old girls who were in that situation held the power in their hands to vapourise all of their tormentors round the table on a whim, she would bet. But of course she couldn't do that. Worse, apparently, according to Hego, whose fault all this was in the first place, she couldn't even lose her temper and tell them all to Go Fuck Themselves, because it would be bad for the image of Team Go. So she had come here tonight and would hard-drink the night away, on the dollar of the hoardes of young men who hung out in these places and fantasised about getting attractive young goth chicks drunk and then spending the night shagging with them like rabbits, in a futile effort to get even slightly buzzed, so that tomorrow she could go back to the Go Tower and do it all again another day, without killing everybody involved in the whole operation. If she found somebody she really, really lusted after, then she might just drag him back to her tiny rent-controlled slum cave and make his most warped fantasies come true - she loved the moment in the morning when they woke up in her bed in daylight and said something like "Oh my god, you're green!" (A quick wave of a flaming hand and a "Congratulations, lover-boy. You just fucked an under-age superhero, so keep your mouth shut about it forever or you'll be in jail getting raped in the showers for the next five years and then I'll be waiting for you when you eventually get out to kick your ass..." invariably dealt with any potential fall-out before it happened). But usually, it was just the drinking. And the moshing. Today, mostly the drinking.

The guy buying her her next drink tapped her on the arm and handed her the double vodka martini she had ordered. She had managed to make herself a selection of decent enough fake IDs but since she didn't have any money to speak of, they weren't much use beyond getting her in the door of places like this. She began to chug it back happily, and then stopped… yep! A roofie! Her palate was quite discerning these days, she could taste adulterants in drinks that 'normal' people couldn't - the curse of the comet had done something to her taste buds as much as the rest of her. Well, she'd enjoy the slight headache later - it would mean she at least felt something after a night of hard drinking, a rare enough situation to be sure. She turned to the guy who had brought her the drink, smiled at him and said "Thanks" in a winning fashion, before draining it in one hit. She appraised him critically. This was her third Rohypnol laced drink in this club, in the last year. But this guy didn't look like the previous two, He was a little older for a start, and he didn't look the type. Well, compared with the other two, anyway. He looked like he had a bit of money, for a start. And he didn't look like an obvious sleaze bag. His future was presumably going to be similar though. Now he was smiling warmly. In about half an hour when she pretended to be out of it, he would be leading her outside and guiding her into the alleyway behind the warehouse that this club ran from. And then he would be waking up with a face like the elephant man after a bad car crash with no seat belt on, looking very closely at his own teeth, laying in a puddle of his blood and snot, on the inside bottom of the dumpster in that alleyway, and wondering why nobody had told him how much a pair of irreparably ruptured testicles would hurt before he decided to turn rapist. But for now, he looked very pleased with himself.

In due course, she started to sway as convincingly as she could, and true to form, he led her outside. But then the playbook changed slightly. He put his arm up at the kerb and a very expensive SUV parked up further down the road came to life and drove up to meet them. She was gently persuaded into the back seat, and the man climbed in alongside her from the other side. "You got one then?", asked the driver, whose eyes Shego could see in the mirror. From where she was sitting, slumped up against the door, she could see an expensive golf shirt and slacks. "No problemo, Phil. And she definitely likes a drink as well, she's been knocking them back hard!", said the man who had just 'kidnapped' her. "Excellent. Well done Harry!" said the driver. 'Intriguing!' thought Shego. 'Oh well, let's see where this is going…'.

The SUV sped through Go City from expensive suburb to expensive suburb, stopping to pick up three more well dressed, well-heeled young men. They all greeted 'Phil' like an old friend. None of them paid her any heed, but by now she was jammed up against the door, as there were four of them crammed onto the leather bench seat in the back of the SUV.

'This is going to be a hell of a lot of fun', thought Shego.

The SUV made a final stop, and this time the driver wound down the window next to two young men, one of whom said "Hi Phil, I've brought a friend along!". "Dave…", said Phil in an admonishing tone. "It''s OK, he's a sound guy, I vouch for him!" said Dave quickly. "What have you told him, Dave?" asked Phil. "Nothing. Nothing at all. Except that I know where there's a great party with hot chicks who are guaranteed to put out! He was all over it!".

"What did I say Dave?" asked Phil, again.

"It's on me, Phil. Seriously. He's rock solid, I promise!".

Phil sighed. "OK, but it really is on you. Understand? Who is he?"

"Name is Peter. Pete. He works on the same trading floor I do", said Dave. Then he called Pete over and introduced him.

"Pleased to meet you, Pete. I'm Phil. We're a bit full I'm afraid, you'll have to hop in the back with Dave…", said the driver. Presently the two final passengers hopped over the tailgate and parked themselves on the little dicky seats in the back of the SUV and they were off again.

Sometime later, the car pulled off the road out of town and into the driveway of a McMansion, up the winding driveway and into a car port next to a very nice Porsche 911 Targa Fiorio. Everybody hopped out, and Harry gently led her out of the door on her side and propelled her in the direction the others were taking, down the driveway to what had obviously once been a double garage, before somebody had bricked up the frontage. A steel door with a padlocked bolt was apparently the only entrance, and Phil unlocked it, sliding the bolt back and opening the door, before flicking a switch just inside. Strip lights flickered into life, as Shego was gently ushered inside and towards a double bed that sat at the far end of the carpeted former garage. From the look of the interior, the walls had a goodly layer of sound insulation on them; perhaps this garage had originally been converted into a band rehearsal studio in a past life? Phil closed the thick steel door, slid a heavy bolt matching the one on the outside into place, padlocked it closed and pocketed the key.

Shego was left alone, sitting apparently spaced out on the rather unhygienic feeling bed as Phil gathered the assembled would-be gang rapists together in the centre of the room, round a concrete pillar that contained a small but, Shego noted, very expensive high quality safe.

"Right, gentlemen, welcome to tonight's little soiree. As you can see, Harry has procured us tonight's entertainment. But because we have ourselves a new party guest tonight, I'm going to have to go through the rules again, just for form's sake. Firstly, there's a $400 cover charge. Cash only…". He held his hand out. There was a rustling of expensive snakeskin wallets and paper money as Phil collected from everybody. There was also a whispered conversation between Dave and Pete, obviously of a 'Don't embarrass me in front of my friends' nature, before Pete reluctantly opened his own Armani billfold and dispensed four crisp $100 bills into Phil's hand.

As he was twirling the combination lock on his safe, shielding the numbers with his body, Phil continued "OK, Rule 2. Nobody marks the girl, and nobody damages her clothes… well… ", he said… then added, glancing at Shego and her thrift-shop reject wardrobe, who was wandering in as apparently aimless a fashion as she could muster towards the heavily padlocked door, "damages them more than they already are damaged. When we have finished tonight we'll put her back where we found her, and she'll have no idea that any of this even happened."

At this point, Pete piped up to say "Wait a minute… isn't that rape?"

"Dave, have a word with Pete for me! Remember, you brought him along! Pete, if she can't remember what happened, or even if anything happened, where she has been or who she was with, then no harm and no foul. Tomorrow, she'll just think she got drunk and had a good night she can't quite remember! Nobody has ever complained!"

'Hmmm…', thought Shego. This was clearly a regular event for these scumbags. Well… apart from Pete. Who was about to become one of them, but hadn't quite yet. At the time she was ostentatiously rattling the padlock with one hand, while very subtly spot-welding the bolt into place with the other, shielding the momentary green flash from Phil and the gang with her body, not that they were paying her any attention. Nobody was getting out of here tonight until she released them…

As she weaved in her best glassy eyed fashion back towards the double bed, Shego saw Phil holding aloft a bag of Cocaine… "Party favours. For later. Cash bar, gentlemen. There's some 'E ' in there as well, and some Viagra in case any of you run out of steam later!"

There was a titter around the group. From all except Pete who was looking very uncomfortable. Peering into the open safe, Shego could see a very large pile of $100 bills, to which Phil was now adding, assorted recreational pharmaceuticals, a big bottle of what she assumed was Rohypnol, a tube of lube, a party sized box of condoms, a Rolex Oyster, an instamatic camera and a set of Porsche keys. Then Phil slammed the safe shut and span the combination lock.

"Right… according to tradition, Harry brought the girl along, he gets first go! Over to you Harry!".

By now Shego had made it back to the bed and slumped down on the edge of it. The remainder of the rapists arranged themselves in a leering semi-circle around the room - all except Pete who went and stood in the corner and cringed. She knew that if the evening proceeded as planned, by the end of it he'd be in as deep as his friends, since just by being here he was as guilty as sin, and peer pressure can be a terrible thing, plus when the cocaine flows, inhibitions shrink. But for now he was clearly an unhappy camper.

Harry approached her, smirking, and took care to position himself so that the rest of the crowd had a good view of what was about to happen. "What is your name, young lady?", he asked pleasantly enough. "Suki…", said Shego, extemporising on the spot. "Well Suki…", he said, unzipping his fly and extracting his already erect cock from his expensive Calvin Kleine's, "I need you to kneel in front of me… ", and then he added "Now!", firmly.

Shego complied.

"And now, I need you to suck my cock, Suki!"

Shego lazily reached her hand up to his erect member, while looking vacantly at his midriff. She ran her hand gently up the shaft until it slipped around his balls, cupping them. Then she leant forward towards him, as he looked around at his co-conspirators with a silly triumphant grin on his face. Then she suddenly gripped his nuts. Not that hard, but hard enough to get his attention back. And she looked up into his eyes and said, very sweetly "Guess again, shithead!". And she squeezed with all of her might, and twisted with all of her comet enhanced strength…

It hadn't really been a fight. More an entertaining work out and a study in the therapeutic nature of extreme martial violence and loud abusive swearing. One of them, Dave, who had so nearly co-opted his friend Pete into a gang-rape, had obviously watched 'Enter the Dragon' or played a lot of Tekken or something because after seeing two of his friends bounced off the walls he had adopted a hokey Bruce Lee stance and shouted "Stay Back, my hands are lethal weapons!".

Apparently they weren't. Although Shego deliciously enjoyed picking up one of the house bricks the double bed was propped up on, one-inch punching it into a cloud of brick dust and rubble with her other hand, dusting them off theatrically, thumbing her nose in classic 'Bruce' style and then giving hands-of-death guy the full 'Neo from the Matrix' come-on.

He went wall, ceiling, wall, other wall, ceiling, ceiling, floor.

She'd made sure to let Phil, who she had left to roam free until last, undo the padlock and spend a good twenty minutes failing to pull the bolt back and get the door open as she kicked the rest of her would-be rapists round the converted garage for fun before she'd dragged him away from it by his collar, ducked the ridiculous punch he had tried to throw at her with hands bloodied and torn from frantically scrabbling at his own steel door, and then scissor kicked him into the air venomously. As he lay on the floor in a crumpled heap after bouncing off the same steel door, she had dragged him upright, slammed him back into the wall as hard as she could repeatedly while working out as much of the remaining anger she was harbouring at him, the Go Foundation, Hego and her life in general. The thick sound insulation provided some cushioning for each hammer blow, but eventually he lost consciousness and she realised that further verbal abuse or violence were probably pointless. She dropped him in disgust, dragged him to the middle of the room where the others lay by one expensively shod leg, and began binding them all hand and foot with anything that was handy. They weren't going anywhere. Actually, broken bones probably limited escape options for several of them anyway. They were all concussed and out cold at present, and none of them had seen her use her plasma powers when they were in a position to do so, so as far as they were concerned she was still Suki, the kung fu ninja bad choice of rape party guest, but as she went down the line of bound ivy-leaguers and wannabes, alternately zapping them on the forehead and then zapping their bindings just enough to obliterate any fingerprints she might have left, a strangled gargle of "Shego!" emanated from the corner of the room, where Pete had been sitting clasped in the foetal position thoughout, completely ignored by the lady in question. Although now that he called her name out, and once she had finished the little clean-up job, she turned her attention to him and said… "Pete…. Pete… what am I going to do with you. You know who I am! Give me your wallet…".

Terrified, he held it out in trembling hand. She snatched it and rifled through it, memorising his name, address and social security number and several other key details,. Then she tossed it back to him.

"Peter Jordan." she said simply. "So, Pete, have you ever been in trouble with the police before?", she asked. "N-No", he said, cringing. "Not even as a Juvenile? Never had a DNA sample taken?". "No!", he said. "Oh well… it may be your lucky day then! Your DNA is all over this place. That and your prints. It will be on file associated with the crime of rape and conspiracy to rape amongst others for at least as long as the statute of limitations lasts, maybe longer. And that is a lot of years in the big house, Pete. With a lot of very nasty people who like sweet rich kids like you a lot! But if you've never been arrested before, and if you make sure to live the rest of your life like a regular saint among boy-scouts, then you may… just may... stay out of jail. So, no unpaid tickets, ever, no domestic violence, no drunk and disorderly, no DUI, no nose candy, no little light Forex fraud on the side… and you could dodge a massive bullet here. Capiche?".

He nodded, looking massively relieved.

"Of course, if you out me for being here, then I may have to reciprocate. So we won't be saying anything to anybody, will we. So, I was never here. You were never here. I may have to have another conversation with the non-friend over there who dragged you down here later to make him agree to that, in case he was thinking of ratting you out, but rest assured the end result should be that the only people who might put you in jail for this will be yourself … or me!"

Pete nodded, desperately.

"So, we may never speak again after today, but on the other hand, one day I might need a favour or several in return. I assume that the really huge favour you owe me for letting you walk away today will still be good?"

Pete nodded again.

"Excellent. Well… you just sit tight there and when I'm done I'll let you out."

She wandered over to the safe. She'd seen a camera in there, and there might be pictures of some of the other victims. She could plasma-cut the safe open, but bang would go any chance of sliding away incognito, so she flexed her fingers until her knuckles cracked, told Pete to hold his breath, stuck a comet-enhanced ear up to the safe door, and worked the combination lock with the expert touch of a pro. 'The benefits of an expensive private education', she smirked to herself.

With a flourish, she opened the door, and peered inside. Yes indeed, there was a stack of polaroids at the back. She only glanced at the top three, but they showed a trio of anonymous random victims being abused. Neither of the pictures she saw showed the woman's tormentors faces, but there were enough identifying marks on the body parts that were shown to nail them, assuming they were in this room. Although right now some of them weren't in quite as good a shape they had been when the pictures were taken. Shego hoped the victims could be identified and find justice. If this stack contained one picture per victim then this gang had raped many tens of women over time, so shutting them down was quite a result.

Rather than put the photos back in the safe, Shego tossed them round the room like confetti, having first removed her prints from them. She was pretty sure that the police would look inside the safe, given the situation, but she didn't want anybody being able to use expensive lawyers to get the search ruled illegal, and spreading the photos round the room meant that the expensive legal argument could never happen. Then she turned back to the other contents. The Rolex appeared on one of the pictures she had seen, presumably on Phil's wrist, so it was important evidence, but the cash money? That would sure buy a lot down at Victoria's Secret. It might also mean she could make rent on her apartment this month. Losing her bolt hole would be a body blow. And she really couldn't see any reason why Phil should be allowed to keep it, knowing as she did how he had come by it. She had a think for a few seconds, and then gathered up what amounted to be $11,400, rolled it up and pocketed it. As she was doing it, she winked at Pete, who was looking at her in amazement. "Bus fare!" she said, with false bravado. Something told her she was crossing a Rubicon, but it didn't actually feel like a bad thing to do.

With one hand, she de-printed the door of the safe, as she had a final peer inside. At the last moment, she reached in and snagged the Porsche keys. 'In for a penny, in for a pound!' she thought. Her 'Governess' had once introduced her to some guys who ran a very civilised chop-shop a little further out of town. They had taught her everything she now knew about internal combustion engines and transmission systems. It had been a couple of years, but she bet they were still there! A Porsche owned by a scumbag would be a nice present for them. Actually, the SUV would probably be good as well. They might give her a few bucks as a finder's fee!

She went along the line of unconscious rapists and liberated another $2,000 or so from their wallets, until finally she came up with the SUV keys. Then, after another quick sweep of the room to make sure she hadn't left any of her own fingerprints about (they iridesced with a slightly green hue if hit with an extremely low intensity burst of plasma, which of course Shego's comet enhanced eyes enabled her to spot), she carefully removed all traces of her earlier spot weld, grabbed the padlock and key, threw back the bolt and said "Come on!" to Pete. He needed no second invitation, and scampered out the door. "Woah boy!", said Shego, as she padlocked the door from the outside, and threw the key as far as she could into the bushes. Then she tossed him the keys to the SUV and said 'First favour. Follow me. Don't break any traffic laws!". And then she headed for the car-port...


	18. Foster of the Yard

Detective Inspector Foster, late rising star and blue-eyed boy of the Flying Squad, but now shunted into career purgatory with the Art and Antiques Squad after blotting his copybook with the higher, more politically correct, echelons of the Metropolitan Police Service, strolled into the Museum of Military Antiquity in Kensington, flashed his warrant card at the 'woodentop' guarding the doors of the 'Japanese' hall, swaggered past him and surveyed the scene within.

It was a typical museum hall, Foster decided, not that he had been in a museum hall since school trips in his distant youth; that vibe of varnished wood floors, pastel painted half-panelled walls, glass display cases and ridiculously high ceilings had stuck with him, though, even if nothing about the actual content of any of those ubiquitous glass display cases had lingered in his noggin.

Out of 15 years of habit, his fingers dived for his shirt pocket to pull himself out a fag, but as they had for all of the last four years, his fingers found the pack of nicotine chewing gum that he kept there instead, unwrapped a stick of gum for him and popped it into his mouth.

In front of him, a couple of white-coverall clad forensic specialists were dusting a prone manikin and a very shiny Japanese helmet for prints next to a shattered display case, and a photographer was taking pictures of a couple of large areas of damage to the armoured glass inner window of the museum hall. He caught sight of his Detective-Sergeant, Jim Murdoch, who was talking to a very tired looking security guard who had clearly expected to be in bed some time ago. Foster was just going to interrupt them, when his DS flipped his notebook closed, and Foster could just hear him saying "...thank you Mr Jones. Please give all your contact details to that officer over there and then you can go home and get some sleep."

Presently, his DS noticed him and sauntered over. "Morning Guv! Right weird one here!"

"What's the SP, Jim?", Foster asked.

"Well now. Alarm activation at Two Thirty Five this morning. Unfortunately, every other alarm in a two hundred and fifty metre radius also went off at this morning. Freak electrical storm."

"Or a cheeky blagger playing with the wiring in the local telephone junction box, more like...", said Foster, dismissively.

"No, really, Guv. Plenty of witnesses and a bit of CCTV. Proper thunder and lightning and everything. No rain though. And only close to here. And only for 5 minutes." said DS Murdoch.

"So you are saying that whatever happened here was an opportunist job? Somebody passing by saw that alarms were suddenly going off and decided to ignore the bank on one side and the jewellers shop on the other and break in to the museum?" asked Foster, rhetorically.

"I'll come back to that, Guv. But the other possibility is that somebody caused the electrical storm to deliberately to cover the robbery...", postulated the DS.

"Stop right there. We are not looking for exciting new ways to drag the Space Cadets into every single case we get, Sergeant. In fact if I never see another smug arse from Global Justice telling me that my investigation is now their investigation and that I can piss off home and play tiddlywinks for all they care, I'll be a deliriously happy bloke. So can you please stop watching old episodes of the X-Files, stop looking for things that go bump in the night or imaginary evil overlords who live in volcanos and stroke white cats all day behind every little job that comes in and get back to nicking villains as nature intended a copper to do. OK?", said an irate Foster.

"Yes Guv!", said his DS. But his face clearly said a lot more than it would be prudent for his mouth to replicate. To be fair to his boss, given that less than a fortnight earlier, London's skies had briefly been darkened by giant laser-wielding robots under the control of some blue-skinned American fast-food magnate intent on taking over the world, even Foster, whose ingrained hatred of the 'Space Cadets' of Global Justice and all their weird and wonderful activities had been a constant throughout all of his long and eventful career as a detective, had the good grace to look at least a little sheepish after he had rehearsed one of his standard reflex rants about an organisation he regarded as the implacable enemy of 'proper good, old-fashioned coppering' .

"Anyway, carry on, what happened at two-thirty-five this morning?", asked the DI.

"Well, the security guard did a walk around once he was able to clear and reset the alarm, and he saw nothing amiss so had no reason to suspect that anything had been stolen, or indeed that an entry had been made, and the local area car and the duty ARV both converged on this street and drove past that window within 5 minutes of all the alarms going off without noticing anything amiss. But some time last night, presumably at two-thirty-five AM, somebody had it away with this..." said the DS, and pulled a museum cataloguing photograph of an extremely second hand, battered looking, dented and corroded helmet out of his notebook.

"What is that when it is at home?" asked DI Foster.

"A pre-feudal Japanese warrior's helmet, apparently. Priceless because it is so rare. One of only three in the world, and the only one that is complete.", said the DS. "Dug up in Japan, it's been in the museum's collection for over 30 years, and in that display case over there for the last 9 years".

"Looks like my Granny's old coal scuttle, and that only cost two shillings and six in old money.", said Foster. "Also, I don't do 'Priceless'. Lean on the curator and get a realistic value out of him, both for a legal sale and on the black market. If you need to, tell him that if he can't, I'll value it for him at £2.50 and then nick _him_ for wasting police time."

"Still doing your bit for police, community relations, eh, Guv?", Jim Murdoch couldn't help himself saying.

"Bollocks to police community relations. I'm not sending the cavalry charging off to look for a £250 rusty coal scuttle just because some history buff has wet dreams about it! Not until there is nothing else getting half-inched anywhere in London! ", said Foster.

"About £100,000 pounds. At auction. I've no idea about the black market, it's really not my field", said a voice from behind him. "Dr Voss, Detective Inspector. This is my exhibit. Or was...".

DS Murdoch visibly cringed, but without skipping a beat, and without further introductions, DI Foster turned around to the eavesdropping academic and said "Thank you Dr Voss. Just a couple more questions… is anything else missing, anything else at all, and what would you say the valuation of the rest of the armour on that mannequin might be, and of that other helmet?"

"Well, Inspector, nothing else is missing, and the armour you see there is a replica made by craftsmen using tradition methods and materials and based on documents, paintings and carvings of the period. We know more than we did about pre-feudal Japanese armour back when it was made, but it's still a pretty good replica. To create something similar now would cost… maybe £20,000? The helmet, though.. I have no idea, I've never seen it before, I'd have tp examine it," said the curator.

Both Detectives did an involuntary double-take when he said he'd never seen the helmet before.. "It's not yours then?", asked the incredulous DI.

"Nope! Nothing to do with us. From here… it looks like a very well crafted replica of the stolen helmet as it was when it was new. Oh yes. Obviously, I need to see it up close to examine the workmanship, check the techniques used to make it for authenticity, see whether it has used the original materials, modern equivalents or just anything handy . From here it could be a plastic moulding for all I know! If it's a real deal top quality replica then there is easily £50,000 in that helmet. £20,000 in fine craftsmanship, and £30,000 in precious metals and stones", said Dr Voss.

"So we have thieves that broke in to this hall under cover of an unpredictable freak weather event that only lasted five minutes , stole a £100,000 original helmet that has got to be worth a lot less than that on the open antiquities black market and left behind a maybe £50,000 replica of the stolen item in its stead?" asked DS Murdoch, rhetorically. "So now I'm thinking… helmet stolen to order. By somebody who felt guilty enough about depriving the museum of the original to gift them a replica. Either that, or I'm thinking something that's going to upset you, Guv."

"Stop that right now. We'll go with the 'stolen to order' angle for now... " said DI Foster, quickly. Then he added, querulously "Hello, is that SOCO pulling up stumps?" .

"That's CSI now Guv.", said DS Murdoch, for at least the hundredth time.

"And that's what's gone wrong with this country right there, Sergeant. American cultural imperialism. They've been Scenes Of Crime Officers for as long as I've been a copper. 2 series of some trashy American TV show about beautiful photogenic people in designer threads playing with Q-tips and test tubes in a branch of Planet Hollywood and suddenly they're having an image do-over and re-branding themselves; it's a bloody disg…" , and then his rant was cut short by a loud clearing of the throat from a tall woman wearing a white coverall and a surgical mask, and carrying a Gladstone bag.

"So, Detective Inspector Foster, what a pleasure to discover this morning that I am working with you again today. Everybody in Metropolitan CSI very much looks forward to those days when we discover that you are going to be the lead investigating officer we are working with", said the tall woman, acidly. "And to answer your questions before you ask them, there are no prints anywhere, on anything that isn't usually accessible to the public, and there is no organic material at all on the helmet there. The glass case was smashed from the inside not the outside, the armoured glass up there was smashed from the inside by a blunt instrument but there is no forensic evidence that anybody has been between the armoured glass and the window glass, no signs of entry, forced or otherwise, no sign that anybody has been up there, in here after closing time yesterday or inside the display case for a very long time. We'll let you know about DNA but the lack of other evidence says we'll come up blank on anything laid more recently than the last time the display case was opened by staff. We have no identified point of entry and no point of egress either, the replica helmet is very heavy, properly worked metal, including a little bit of real gold, definitely no plastic, and even though we think we will be able to show that that helmet is what smashed that armoured glass up there, by hitting it at very high speed in two different places, it has not a dent or a scratch on it. And now, gentlemen, with a heavy heart, I have to bid you adieu! Bye bye!" And then she strode away, followed by the rest of her team.

"She doesn't like you, Guv!", said the DS, redundantly.

"I shall cry myself to sleep tonight!", said Foster, sarcastically. "Meanwhile, either that helmet in the picture magically changed into that helmet down here, in which case we'll be knee deep in Space Cadets by Wednesday, and you'll be in seventh heaven Sergeant, or the key to this case will be finding out who made the damned thing. And since I don't want anything to do with the bastard Space Cadets, I want you to grab that shiny metal hat, and sit down with the good Dr Voss while he tells you everything there is to possibly tell you about it, and then I want you to bring it back to the dream factory and we'll put it into the art fraud lab and let them see if they can tell us who made it. I've got to go and meet one of my snouts now so I'll see you back there later . Alright?"

"Yes Guv! See you later, then…" said Sergeant Murdoch. He knew that 'meeting one of my snouts' was Foster code for 'in the nearest pub, necking a cheeky pint. Or two', but as long as he was in the boozer drinking , he wasn't in the office winning friends, influencing people and generally being a pain in the proverbial so he didn't actually mind.

"Dr Voss…", he shouted. "Come and join me please, I'd like you to have a look at this replica helmet with me…".


	19. Summer School

Summer School

Ron had three full days at Yamanouchi before his flight left for Hong Kong, and there was much to be done. He needed to learn the Saru Chonouryoku cover story inside out, because whilst there wasn't very much cover story to learn, what there was had to be so instinctively ingrained as to be second nature to him; after all, as Sensei pointed out to him, the only person who could catch Ron out as Saru Chonoryouko was Ron himself. He was also told he needed to take the pre-feudal edge off his old high Japanese vocabulary and learn enough modern words and constructs that he could credibly explain away his oddly archaic and anachronistic phrasing in his supposedly native language as a mere peculiarity. The best plan, according to Sensei, was for him to speak English as much as possible, but the more fluent and less obviously ancient the Japanese he did use, the better. And he would need to wear the Cuff of Sosumiha for the whole three days, as well; he'd be wearing it for a lot longer than that at the tournament so he'd need to get used to living in Toshimiru's skin full time.

He spent twelve hours on that first day, in character as Saru Chonouryoku, alternately answering quick-fire questions about his life story, and being corrected whenever he made a mistake either linguistically or when answering questions about his 'legend', as he had once seen a cover story described in a cheezy cold-war spy flick. Mostly being corrected, truth be told. It quickly became clear that the single sheet of paper was a wholly inadequate life story for anybody who had 28 years to account for, even if for the purposes of the 'legend' he had spent all those 28 years inside the walls of Yamanouchi following the ascetic life and monotonous daily routine of a fanatical student of Tai Sheng Pek Kwar. The story was embellished to explain each of the handful of scars that defaced Toshimiru's extraordinary physique, and then to cover the names, physical characteristics and specialisms of the most important teachers he would have learned from during that 28 years of monomaniacal study. Finally, critical and memorable events from the last quarter century of the almost two millennia of history of Yamanouchi were added to the mix ("Saru, when did the new dining hall open and which former Sensei was it named for?"). By the end of the day, Ron didn't know who he was, let alone whether any of this new information would stick. He collapsed full length onto his tatami mat and was asleep before he landed again after the first bounce.

Day two of his total immersion in the imaginary world of Saru Chonouryoku began typically far too early at Yamanouchi, but continued in much the same vein. However, by lunchtime, something amazing had started to happen. Ron had started to get it. He really could reel off facts on demand, talk fondly about the big mole on the nose of the nunchaka instructor he had supposedly learnt advanced rice flail techniques from ten years earlier, and describe the decor in the great hall before the last redecoration. The number of mistakes he was making was dwindling rapidly. They hadn't been eliminated yet, but Ron was confident now for the first time that another day and a half of reinforcement and fine tuning would see him transformed into an entirely believable and confident Saru Chonouryoku. By the evening, despite being absolutely exhausted, he was almost impossible to catch out. That night, when he keeled over face-first onto his tatami mat, he was no less exhausted, but a smile of accomplishment played around the corners of his mouth.

Day three dawned all too quickly, but not quickly enough for Ron and the student body at Yamanouchi, who had already been up and at it for half an hour before the sun joined them. The testing was enlivened this morning by a dozen senior students attacking Ron simultaneously with various weapons to try and distract him, while several instructors threw quick fire and deliberately trick questions at him. By ten in the morning, neither the weapons of the ninja nor the probing questions of the instructors had breached Ron's defences even the once, and Sensei called a halt to the testing.

"Master Stoppable, you are ready!", he announced.

Ron bowed to Sensei imperiously. Then he turned and bowed equally imperiously to the students who had spent four hours unsuccessfully trying to clobber him. And then he said "Booyah!" to nobody in particular.

The remainder of the day was far less frenetic. Ron studied photographs of the missing Yamanouchi alumni until he was sure he would recognise them at a glance across a crowded room, and then he studied the original plans of 'Klaustaffen Island Coaling Station', which Yamanouchi had somehow managed to obtain. Ron was well aware that in the subsequent 80 odd years a lot would likely have changed, but he was also told that while the tunnel and cave network would almost certainly have grown since 1923, it was unlikely to have shrunk. And then he was free to wander the school grounds and enjoy the summer sunshine and the breeze around the summit of Mount Yamanouchi. Somewhere around the school, his supposedly inseparable companion Rufus was continuing to enjoy the fawning attentions of the younger students; he was such a tart for a bit of cupboard love, Ron thought, ruefully. A bit of petting and some premium snackage and he was anybody's. Though, Ron realised slightly guiltily, he hadn't really thought much about the little fellow for the past three days. They had greeted each other cheerily a couple of times as they passed each other during that time, Ron en-route to or from a gruelling session of quick-fire cramming on his new alter-ego, Rufus in the company of one or another group of giggling children intent on skritching him between the ears and feeding him little cubes of Sushi until he popped. He'd enjoy catching up with the little fellow later, but for now the brief separation didn't seem to be doing either of them any harm.

In due course, Ron found himself sitting cross-legged in silent contemplation atop the ancient weatherworn ramparts of the Yamanouchi school, serenely watching occasional small fluffy clouds moving slowly across the otherwise clear blue sky, and casting small scudding shadows across the epic scenery of the range of smaller but still imposing tree covered peaks that surrounded Mount Yamanouchi.

'The calm before the storm', he thought to himself.

He wondered what Kim was doing right now. He realised that he missed her very much indeed. Was she sitting at home, pining for him, he wondered? Draken & Shego would surely be out of circulation for a while, after the whole giant killer robot thing, and he fondly hoped that the rest of the 'usual suspects' would be keeping their heads down for a time in the aftermath as well. But maybe she was even now battling Professor Dementor in some dimly lit lair?

Without him by her side...

She'd probably be doing rather better on her own, if she _was_ currently fighting evil, he reflected sadly. The absence of a clumsy, gawky, blonde youth with intermittently vanishing pants could hardly be regarded as a major crimp to her crime fighting style, he reflected with momentary melancholy.

Then, he smiled to himself as he realised that he would be back in Middleton in almost no time at all, with an amazing tale of intrigue and heroic derring do to share with a rapt and adoring girlfriend.

Also, he thought with a smile, this incredible expanding Ninja outfit they had given him was all one piece. So there was absolutely no way at all that he could lose his pants on Lo Pin's island. Well... Probably. And even if he did, he could definitely edit that bit out of the dramatised version he would recount to Kim, anyway...

He lapsed again into vacant meditation.

It was perhaps half an hour later that he first became aware of hushed whispers and muffled giggling emanating from somewhere nearby. It was half an hour after that before he looked around and was shocked to find a large percentage of the teenage female demographic amongst the student body crowded together a little further along the high wall. But where he was sitting facing the rugged beauty of the Hakami mountain range, they were all sitting together and facing him!

He blushed slightly, and said "Hi Ladies!", self-consciously. It didn't sound quite the same when Toshimiru's vocal chords enunciated it, Ron realised. When it left his brain it sounded embarrassed, self-effacing and goofy. When it came out of his mouth it sounded much more like "The LURVE DOCTOR is in DA HOUSE" than an embarrassed greeting by a cripplingly shy teenage boy. Which probably explained why about 30 hands went up in unison to wave to him, and there were a number of dreamy sighs, a couple of gasps and several low moans, accompanied by some embarrassed shifting about amongst some of the impromptu audience.

Ron tried to return to his serene mountain-gazing, but the whole 'crowd of adoring teenage girls who look worryingly like they might suddenly decide to pounce en masse and eat me at any moment' thing was a little distracting, to say the least.

He decided to go and find Rufus instead.

Springing athletically to his feet, he turned to the ever growing throng and said "Bye ladies!". Again the powerful PA system installed in his throat turned it into something embarrassingly suggestive. Now 40 hands waved back at him, and there was a collective moaning sigh of almost visceral disappointment.

Ron skedaddled as quickly as he could, without risking a look back...


	20. Pink Oboe Solo

Pink Oboe Solo

As it turned out, Rufus was very happy indeed to see Ron, and they cheerfully caught up with each other's news. Well, sort of. Ron talked excitedly through his week so far, while Rufus listened attentively and grunted 'Uh huh!' at various points, and then Rufus chittered and grunted away semi-comprehensibly, as was his way, about all the fun he had been having, and all the new varieties of sushi he had inhaled, while Ron smiled paternally and scratched the little pink mole-rat's stomach affectionately. The dinner gong sounded and they went to the mess hall together, and Rufus demonstrated that despite 3 days of raw-fish related extreme gourmandising, his appetite remained undiminished; he hoovered up almost all of the contents of Ron's plate in addition to his own!

But then, after dinner, and much to Ron's surprise, Rufus announced that he had to go; he had a briefing of his own with Sensei. Apparently they had some clever little electronic gizmo they wanted to teach him how to use. As he bounded off towards Sensei's pagoda, Ron decided that he had not only earned an early night, he _needed_ one; sleep was always at a premium at Yamanouchi, he'd been burning the candle at both ends since he had arrived, and he wanted to be well rested before the start of tomorrow's super-secret ninja mission.

oOo

Ron had been asleep for about two and a half hours when he was awoken by a polite but insistent knocking on the doorframe of his little paper-walled cubicle. He blinked the sleep out of his eyes and sat up, confused. There was a shadowy figure silhouetted on the other side of the paper wall.

The polite knocking resumed.

Ron sighed quietly. So much for his early night!

Bounding silently upright, he started to pad towards the door. And then he realised that he was a tiny bit stark naked! 'Probably not a sight Sensei needs to see again', thought Ron, remembering his unfortunate indecent exposure moment in Sensei's formal garden. "Just a minute!", he whispered hoarsely.

The knocking stopped.

Quickly he slipped on a pair of the incredible expanding underpants, which promptly moulded themselves around his nether regions in a way that left little to the imagination and left him wondering whether he might as well not have bothered, though on balance he was sure Sensei would appreciate the thought...

He padded to the door, and slid it open.

"Sensei... OH!".

Rather than his rotund mentor, he found himself face to face with the instructor who he had first met when he had rather embarrassingly flashed her as she brought him his first set of the new wardrobe he had been wearing for the last three days. She had her hand over her mouth, stifling a gasp as he all but did the exact same thing again!

"Meko-chan!", exclaimed Ron, reflexively clasping his giant hands over his crotch. "What's wrong?".

"Nothing is wrong, Master Stoppable!", she said quickly. "Nothing at all!".

"Then... How can I help you, Meko-chan?", he asked, slightly confused. He realised that she had eschewed the grey shinobi shozoko that he was used to seeing her wear, in favour of just the jacket portion of a karate gi.

'Very nice legs', thought Ron, in passing.

'I came to see if you were comfortable, Master Stoppable...', Meko said, earnestly.

"Yes... yes, thank you, quite comfortable. The whole tatami mat deal... it kind of grows on you!", he grinned.

"Oh...", said Meko, seemingly a little disappointed for reasons that quite escaped Ron, "well are you sure you aren't a little... cold, Master Stoppable?".

"No... No, thank you, Meko-chan, I'm quite warm, actually. The climate here is very mild. It's all good!", he said quickly, and smiled reassuringly.

"Oh...", said Meko, with what Ron thought was a subtle tinge of inexplicable frustration colouring her voice. Then she added "You have been training hard, Stoppable-san. You look quite...", she looked him up and down with an expression that Ron couldn't quite identify, then continued breathily "...Tense. It would be my honour to offer you a massage, to ease your tired muscles and to better prepare you for your mission...".

"No, no... I think I'm good, Meko-chan. No sore muscles at all. I'm as loose as a goose in fact. I was just catching up on lost sleep, is all. But thank you for the offer, and everything, it was really very nice indeed of you to think of me...".

There was a period of silence as Meko looked a little crestfallen, and Ron idly noticed that the 'V' at the junction of the two lapels of her gi framed her impressive cleavage very nicely.

Anxious to break the silence, Ron yawned theatrically and said "Well... Time for me to hit the hay again, I think. Thanks for stopping by, Meko-chan, it was very thoughtful, but I'm definitely OK. I'm pretty sure I have another really early start in the morning, so I'd better get my head down. Goodnight, Meko-chan!".

Meko was looking down at the floor. "Goodnight, Master Stoppable, I am very sorry for disturbing you...", she all but mumbled.

"Thanks again!", smiled Ron, as he slid the door closed, then padded back to his tatami mat, shucked the indecently clingy underpants and lay down again.

Thirty seconds later he was fast asleep.

It was another five minutes before the silhouette on the other side of the paper wall finally trudged slowly away, with a dejected sigh.

oOo

Few people had ever genuinely described Ron as being spectacularly quick on the uptake, but many would admit that he did usually get there in the end.

Two hours and thirty-seven minutes after he had closed his eyes for the second time that night, Ron suddenly awoke and sat bolt upright as if catapulted off his tatami mat by a giant spring.

There was a long pause, as Ron stared at nothing in particular, mouth open, and his left eye twitched a couple of times, while his brain whirred repeatedly through his brief conversation with Meko-chan earlier.

He was a healthy (he assumed) 17 year old young male! He had watched The Graduate. Twice. He'd watched the entire American Pie box set three times. He kept a super-size Smarty-Mart monster-box of man-sized tissues and a salon-sized bottle of lotion in his bedroom night stand at home, and his luridly unrealistic masturbatory fantasies often featured outrageously implausible situations that led to 'it only ever happens in the depraved mind of a sex-starved teenage boy' hot-Ron-man lovin' with any number of Hollywood starlets and pop chantreux (a psychologist would have had a field day trying to explain why his waking erotic fantasies most often featured people he didn't actually know or ever expect to meet in real life, yet his unbidden erotic dreams only ever seemed to feature people he _had_ met). He had in fact even whacked off enthusiastically in the past to lurid fantasies based on similar situations. Although he'd never ever again risk conflating plot-lines from American Pie & The Graduate in his mind and applying the resulting composite character to his own life to construct a fantasy, as he once had. Apparently Mrs Robinson mixed with Stifler's Mom and Ron's real world gave... well, let's just say that the phrase "Call me 'Kim's Mom'!" had a new and unforgettable resonance. And that was so completely Sick & Wrong that Ron had felt guilty about what he was fantasising about all the way through to the vinegar strokes and beyond. It had taken a hard-core 5 hour Everlot session to help him dull the memories enough that he could tune them out almost entirely... If Mrs Dr P wasn't still so smoking hot for a… more mature woman, it would have been a lot easier…

And yet, despite all that intense training and preparation... Cometh the hour, he had totally, completely, absolutely and comprehensively blown it. If he pretended for a moment that Kim didn't exist.. or would totally understand why he just had to take such an opportunity when it walked into his cubicle half naked late at night and offered him a massage... or that he wouldn't have nobly spurned her incredibly hard to ignore advances out of loyalty and respect for his new girlfriend's feelings (not to mention fear of her later kicking him fifteen feet into the air in a fit of righteous jealous rage), then he felt like a complete and utter idiot.

At least if he had declined to spend the rest of the night wrapped in a writhing, filthy, sweaty, grunting, shuddering embrace with the firm, toned, lithe, long-limbed and quivering body of the really very very attractive Meko-chan because he didn't want to cheat on the woman he loved (loved? When on earth did that happen, he wondered? He was probably just over-dramatising or something), then at least he could feel halfway noble about feeling bad. Or something like that, anyway. Instead he just felt... incredibly dumb. He could have successfully traded in his 'V' card, but instead he was faced with being stripped of his 'horny teenage boy' credentials!

"Oh man...", he said out loud, to nobody in particular, realising that thinking about the rise and fall of Meko-chan's flushed cleavage, what she was (or wasn't) wearing under that skimpy, lightweight gi jacket, and what he would have found at the top of those long, slender but well toned legs that he had innocently appreciated earlier, had transformed what had never been 'Little Ron' between Toshimiru's tree trunk legs into a rod of iron. A big rod of iron.

There was only one thing that would make him feel better now. He would just have to imagine what would have happened if he _had_ invited the nubile, athletic, desperate instructor in to keep him warm when she had offered herself to him and then let her have her wicked, depraved way with him.

Not what he uncomfortably suspected would probably have really happened of course ("Ngghh! Urrrgh! Oh no! Err... Meko... Err... sorry... Err... Did you happen to bring a wash cloth with you?"), but what would have happened in 'Ron-man sexual fantasy world'. As if gorgeous lust-fuelled and hopefully highly experienced Asian lady Monkey-Kung-Fu instructors visiting you in your bed in the dark of the night didn't come straight out of the Ron-Man fantasy wank-bank hall of fame...

He lay back and savoured the day dream for a moment, as in his mind's eye he saw Meko sachay into his cubicle, shucking off the karate gi jacket that was definitely all she was wearing in this edition of Rontastic Erotic Theatre, to reveal imaginarily perfect breasts and a taut washboard stomach, before leaping athletically onto him, impaling herself full length on Toshimiru's... his... enormous shaft with a banshee yell, wrapping her long powerful legs around his back and digging her heels into the base of his spine...

Ron realised that he had grasped the aforementioned rod of iron and begun to work it with unexpected dexterity and expertise. I mean, sure, time, trial and error and lots and lots of intensive practice had eventually made him pretty good at teasing the right kind of response out of little Ron when he wanted to 'knock one out' as the vernacular had it. But he'd never before made the shapes with his hand that he was instinctively making now, and... Wow! Also, he now had the answer to a query he had never expected to ever be able to answer; he had never gone so far as to explicitly form the question 'so, what if anything am I missing by having been circumcised?' but it had always been hovering somewhere there, threatening to be asked. Now he thought he had half an idea, courtesy of Toshimiru's magnificently uncut manhood. If he hadn't been circumcised at birth then... he'd have saved a fortune on lotion. Otherwise... Meh!

He closed his eyes, as the sensations building in his loins and fanning out down his thighs and up towards his midriff crowded out both the fantasy ninja sex-queen and existential thoughts about the utility of the human foreskin. And then, quite suddenly, for the first time since he had battled his fellow students during Sensei's surprise pop-quiz in his formal garden several days earlier, a vivid flashback hit him like an Amtrak express...

It seemed like only yesterday. He was in a rustic hot-tub in a dimly lit hut. He could feel intense lust and arousal. He was deep into a passionate kiss. A muscular arm encircled him, a hand caressed his engorged penis, and then he felt hot breath on his cheek and the scratch of stubble as it dragged across his cheek...

There was a muffled thud as the cuff of Sosumiha hit the tatami mat next to him, and then his once-again teenage body, completely overwhelmed by the powerful sensations he had been experiencing milli-seconds before, tensed involuntarily, his nut-sack tightening as his gonads reached the 'firing now' part of the hitherto unstoppable sequence that would imminently spurt hot sticky Ronmeister-gravy inconveniently all over himself and his cubicle; he quickly had to resort to a Sumatran restraint tantra to ensure that the shuddering orgasm that wracked his body didn't make a very embarrassing mess...

Ron lay in the dark, breathing heavily, in a state of semi-shock, eyes like organ stops as two huge questions hung heavily over him.

Firstly, 'What the FUCK was that flashback all about?'.

Secondly, 'What the hell is a Sumatran restraint tantra and how the buggering fuck do I know how to do one'?

After a little while his breathing slowed as he willed himself to think calm, happy thoughts. And then he started to ask himself questions. Had the cuff of Sosumiha turned him gay? Was that a little side-effect of using it that nobody had bothered to mention? Was he going to be having unwanted erotic dreams about making the gorilla with two backs with Monkey-Fist from now on instead of shagging Shego? Because if so, Sensei could shove his secret Ninja mission where the sun didn't shine. He imagined that the conversation with Kim wouldn't go too well after he got home. "Sorry Kim, I know we just got together and all, but I'm afraid that Sensei has turned me gay, so... you know. Hey, we can still hang together though! Oh, I've just realised, this couch is _so_ wrong for this room...".

'OK.. Calm, happy thoughts...'.

He thought back to his flashback again, probing it. He was mildly relieved to realise that the thought of getting jiggy with a man in a hot-tub mildly revolted him. A feeling of which he was equally slightly ashamed.

'Way to be open minded, Ron!'.

Perhaps he was only gay when he wore the cuff? Oh how the legion of ladies of all ages who swooned over Toshimiru's stunning physical presence would weep were that the case!

He summoned up his courage and refastened the cuff around his arm. Once again, he was Toshimiru made flesh, and he immediately probed his memory, very nervously.

After a while, his insecurities receded as he realised that it was the monkey master who had been wearing the cuff who had been in total ecstasy when he ('or maybe it was a she' wondered Ron) had been being masturbated by another man. Ron found the incredibly hot woman who had also been sitting in the hot-tub at the time and was obviously playing with herself far, far more interesting.

'Phew... Panic over!', thought Ron, with a huge inner sigh of relief. 'I wonder what other surprises this freaky thing has in store for me?'.

He decided to try to replay the entire encounter in the hot-tub in his mind's eye. It took a little effort, but he was able to remember the highlights of the last few hours of the final Guardian of Sosumiha, or at least those last few hours when he had been wearing the cuff. He noticed a strange thing, though. Even though he knew that the idea of having sex with a man did sort of repulse him, despite him wishing that it wouldn't, the inner mystical monkey of the cuff of Sosumiha seemed to present the memories to him with complete equanimity. Presumably it had no prejudices, no sexual orientation of it's own, and no subjectivity; the same magical effect that allowed him to remember viciously dismembering a hundred fellow human beings, all be it none of them exactly fine upstanding citizens, without losing his lunch or having nightmares about being a mass killer, was clearly also at work as he followed the last Guardian's quest for sexual fulfilment in his mind's eye. Unlike the Lotus blade, which seemed to make considered choices about which Monkey Master it preferred to be wielded by, the cuff had no conscience, and made no judgements, moral, ethical, emotional or orientational. Once Ron had embraced that and forced himself not to worry about his own psychological state, moral compass, attitudes, orientation or prejudices being warped by the memories he was able to experience through the cuff, it made the experience of peering back into the murky and brutal history of pre-feudal Japan far more interesting than it was potentially terrifying.

But there was one thing he wanted to see now. Just to be absolutely doubly sure, and to set his mind at rest.

He wanted to find a reassuring memory of one of the Guardian's of Sosumiha having sex with a woman...

oOo

He had no luck in his quest. None at all. As he probed the memories of the cuff, there was an unbelievable amount of carnage, and absolutely no sweet loving to be found anywhere. Back then, 'Monkey Master' would seem to have been a synonym for 'single-minded hyper-efficient killing machine'. Many of the memories seemed to feature the wearer of the cuff screaming blue-murder as he or she charged apparently suicidally into close-quarter melee combat with large groups of heavily armed opponents, laying waste to them all in a hideous blizzard of clashing steel, screams of mortal agony, spraying blood and flying body-parts, and then charging on full-tilt into the next one-sided combat; Ron was ever more grateful for the ancient magicks that were seemingly protecting his sanity in the face of what would surely normally be several lifetimes worth of horrific and inescapably traumatic memories.

But no getting jiggy-jiggy. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Not even a crafty hand-shandy! 'Boy, no wonder those ancient Monkey Masters were so cranky!', thought Ron, as he realised that he could remember back all the way to the first time anybody had ever tried on the freshly enchanted Cuff of Sosumiha, and was still drawing a blank.

He was about to give up when he remembered the story of Master Kwon, his last session with the scribe, and his garbled story of memories from a time _before_ the forging of the cuff.

'Oh well...', thought Ron, 'Here goes nothing...', as he tried to push back past 'the beginning'.

At first he had no joy at all. It was an opaque wall, seemingly as amenable to traversal as the wall that separated his own memories from the time before he was born. But he persevered, he probed, he pressed and he pushed against the apparently impenetrable barrier, because... well, he was a sucker for a good conspiracy theory. And, ignobly, because he still wanted to clear up the whole 'Are you really absolutely certain that I'm still going to be into the babes?' thing...

Twenty minutes later, he tensed, his eyes opened wide, and his face took on an expression of utter shock mixed with wide-eyed wonder. He spoke out loud, in a vacant daze, to nobody in particular.

"Holy... Shit!"


	21. Inspirational Video

Inspirational Video

The lights came up in Secure Lecture Hall Three at Global Justice HQ to an audience for the most part stunned into silence. The Global Justice 'Shego Does an Uzbek Torture Dungeon' film they had just watched wasn't as slickly produced or as well cut together as Wade's magnum opus, it had also been edited to be slightly less hard to watch and certain things had been substantially blurred over to try to reduce the risk that Infrastructure Services would need to hose gallons of vomit out of Lecture Hall Three after the showing, but the impact was still more than substantial.

A low, shocked sounding murmur eventually began amongst the audience, who consisted mainly of key figures in Subject Analysis department, diplomats from Concordat Relations, off-duty Operation's Room staff, two thirds of the Incident Reporting team and as many staff officers as were free to attend. This eclectic mix of interested parties was leavened slightly by a smattering of field agents and hover-ship pilots who happened to be in the HQ complex when the rumours that 'an after action film that will really blow your mind' would be shown that afternoon in one of the lecture halls started to spread, and an assortment of interested scientists.

Mike Jones leant across to Dr 'Digger' Hawk and whispered a very heartfelt "Fuck Me!" under his breath. "I think I now understand the widespread obsession with proving she's definitely dead! She's enough to give anybody who has pissed her off nightmares!", he continued. "Although if it was me , I'd give her a posthumous medal for fucking up that place. I reckon those people were long overdue to be dead. I can't believe the CIA was going to hand her over to them! Actually, I can't believe they hand anybody over to people like that…"

After about a minute, Dr Director stood up from her seat in the front row and faced the audience. The murmur died down rapidly as people noticed her presence, and then somebody said 'Shhhh' to attract the attention of those too engrossed in their own conversations to realise she was there and glaring at them balefully through her one good eye.

After silence descended, she spoke; "As you will all know, Shego is currently posted as missing, presumed dead. The reality is that the only thing we don't have are remains, and we are trying to locate those at the moment. Nevertheless, as long as she remains merely 'presumed dead', she is still an active 'Y' list entity as far as the concordat is concerned, and so we still keep skin in the game, OK? To that end, Incident Reporting need to issue the un-redacted version of that film as part of a late addendum to after action report 40317. Concordat Relations? You need to find somebody to leak an under the counter copy of that film to the CIA for us with our covert blessing. I want the Director of Central Intelligence to be peeing in his pants; that way he might at least think twice before he does anything like this again. Subject Analysis, this is still a live tier one profile until we have proof of mortality, and this is clearly an alpha-level incident, so that makes updating this profile a Priority One-Alpha, dead or not. As soon as you've finished work on the Possible profile, I want this processed. If the worst happened, and by some malign miracle, Shego popped up on the TV news tomorrow morning, we'd be rightly castigated for taking our eyes off the ball if we had nothing relevant to say about it. Alright?". Dr Director paused and looked around the silent lecture theatre as if expecting collective agreement. A few seconds later she chose to assume that she had it, not that this was ever in much doubt, and continued "Alright! You can pick up digital copies of both the redacted and the un-redacted versions of the video you have just seen on your way out, if you have a genuine operational need of them. Good day, ladies and gentlemen!"

With that, she strode for the door. But Mike Jones had already tuned out. He was considering a bizarre possibility that had only just occurred to him after seeing for himself the power of Shego's plasma hands after she first entered the dungeon. They had pretty much stalled in their search for survival strategies for Shego, after carefully investigating the contents of the cockpit both before and after the crash and trying to identify anything in the list of missing items that Shego might have constructed some kind of parachute or glider from, given the 45 seconds she had before the cockpit hit the water with her inside; the conclusion, after an entire day with an identical pile of random cockpit detritus, was that there was no possibility that anything could have been manufactured out of the unaccounted for bits and pieces to even slightly slow Shego's final fall, even if McGuiver and the A-Team had both been in there with her for a week, never mind on her own in about 30 seconds. So, they'd given up and switched to looking for her body, studying ocean currents, working out where she might have tracked to across the sky to determine potential water entry points, etc etc. After a lot of careful analysis, they identified a range of possible locations for Shego's remains, all of which had already been extensively searched by the CIA and the US Navy. His first scientific gig at Global Justice was looking like a total bust.

But… here was something new to explore. It looked mad, it looked beyond mad in fact, it was probably impossible, but he had taken 'Digger' Hawk's initial advice to heart - find the only route that Shego _could_ have survived by, and there was a better than par chance that you'd find a live Shego at the end of it .

"Digger", he said conspiratorially to Dr Hawk, after dragging him into a dark corner of the rapidly emptying lecture theatre. "You're ultimate specialism is thermodynamics, is it not?".

"That's right, mate. Three published peer-reviewed papers on convection boundary effects in Liquid Sodium Substrates. Why do you ask?", replied the Australian.

"You must be a real riot at parties", grinned Mike. "But no, I need your help. I have a really, and I mean _really_ left field theory that might see Shego surviving the fall from the plane, I reckon I have the data to prove or disprove it one way or the other, but I'm really going to have trouble with some of the more complex calculations; it's not a branch of mathematics I have a lot of experience with, in fact it's really outside of my field. It's bang up your alley, though."

"Intriguing!", said Digger. "But… not here. I'll see you in the lab, straight after lunch, and we can take a look together, OK?".

"Thank you, Digger! It'll be a huge help. But… I hope you don't mind if I start without you? I'm champing at the bit here…", replied Mike.

"Fine by me, mate. I'll bring you up a sandwich and a cup of coffee from the canteen when I come then, shall I?", responded Dr Hawk.

"Thanks, make it a BLT please, and it's a tea not a coffee, white no sugar. I'll see you later then?", asked Mike.

"No worries!", grinned Dr Hawk, and headed for the canteen, leaving Mike Jones to head back to the lab with a renewed sense of optimism. 'It's definitely proper science', he reflected, ' but I can never shake the feeling that I need to bring a couple of twenty sided dice to the office with me in the mornings…'. He continued towards the lab, whistling the 'Captain Scarlet' theme tune to himself...


	22. The Clock Ticks On

22. The Clock Ticks On

It hadn't been her fault, decided Kim, as she took her shiny new suitcase from the immaculately turned out chauffeur. Temptation had been placed unavoidably in her way. When the boutique staff had decanted themselves into the Dragon Queen Suite yesterday evening, they had come very well provided with rails of clothes that they felt were appropriate for Kim, along with several fashion models and even a master of ceremonies to commentate on the impromptu fashion show. The one thing that hadn't been on display were price tags, presumably on the principle that if you needed to ask what it cost you probably couldn't afford it. The very slinky little black dress she had selected for dinner looked innocuous enough; had she known then that it was by 'Chanel' and thus not merely expensive but obscenely and ridiculously so, she would have left it on the rail. And of course, having sold her the dress, they wouldn't hear of her not completing the ensemble with 'the matching accessories', in the form of a pair of incredibly expensive and impractical hand-crafted high heel shoes, hand-stitched black silk cami-knickers and a strapless bra that both fitted perfectly and actually supported things (so she knew it must be horribly expensive). But the pièce de résistance of the whole ensemble, were the fine fishnet stockings, and the associated garter belt, which she had actually worn under the dress to complete the outfit when she went to dinner. The sumptuous gourmet feast that followed in the hotel restaurant was better than she could have ever even imagined it might be. And, before she stepped into her private elevator on the way down to partake of it, she stared at herself in the mirror for a while and came to the conclusion that she had never actually looked hotter in her life. The stockings and suspenders in particular and quite unexpectedly made her _feel_ as outrageously sexy as the visible ensemble made her look. Perhaps, she had decided, she would need to give this outfit one more try back in Middleton before she donated it to charity. Ron would absolutely love it, she had reflected, before frowning as she realised how much she missed having him around.

Reality slightly intruded after dinner when Kim discovered that said expensive new outfit wouldn't fit in her battered holdall, but she solved that problem by acquiring a very nice suitcase on wheels from the boutique team, into which both her new and outrageously costly outfit and the contents of her trusty holdall fitted with ease. She had a horrible feeling that the price of the case that Lo Pin had just purchased for her would comfortably exceed the price of an equivalent item at Middleton Smarty Mart by a factor of many, but it was either that or leave the uber-hot new look behind at the hotel, and she wasn't about to do that!

Hotel beds, even King Size four poster ones with three foot thick mattresses, apparently couldn't protect her from the nightmares the way a first class airline seat could, unfortunately, but that morning, rather than 'dressing for breakfast', she had eaten a marvellously decadent breakfast cooked for her by her own chef on a kitchen range that rose from the floor of her suite on demand. Then, dressed in the now freshly laundered clothes she had flown into Hong Kong wearing, she hit the private elevator for the final time to check out, and to meet the car that Lo Pin had arranged to take her, via many of the sights of Hong Kong, to her dockside rendezvous.

Kim waited until the Rolls Royce had pulled serenely away, leaving her alone with her suitcase and an empty, wind-blown access road adjacent to the container terminal on Stonecutter's Island; after a few moments, she sauntered into the shadow of a giant shipping container and took a good look around to ensure that she wasn't being observed.

Then she pulled the Kimunicator from her pocket and said "Hi Wade! What's the sitch?".

Wade's face blinked into view and he said "Hi Kim!". Then a moment or two later he added "Woah! Kim, what have you done to your eyebrows?".

"Spa treatment, Wade. It's a girl thing. Is there anything I need to know before I temporarily say goodbye?"

"They look.. different, Kim," he said. "Good, though!" he added quickly, before continuing "No news on Shego, Kim. CIA still looking, Global Justice still looking, nobody wants to stop searching until they find... something. I really don't see any way she could have made it, though, Kim...".

"I know, Wade", sighed Kim. "Have you heard anything from Ron?".

"Sorry Kim. If I do hear from him before we talk again, is there anything you'd like me to tell him?".

'Yes', thought Kim, sighing inwardly. 'But definitely nothing I'd want to tell him via an about to be 11 year old boy!'.

"Tell him I'm thinking of him, Wade. But I've got to go and sign in now, I think, so I guess this is goodbye for a couple of days!",

"OK, Kim. I'll try and get the Kimunicator to you as soon after you reach the island as I can, so hopefully you won't be out of contact for very long...", said Wade reassuringly.

"You rock Wade!", replied Kim. "Shall I just leave you here?".

"Kim, please throw the Kimunicator as high up into the air as you can for me. We'll speak very soon!", said Wade.

"Bye Wade!", said Kim, and then windmilled her right arm a couple of times to build up speed and released the blue plastic high-tech gizmo skywards.

The Kimunicator rocketed into the wide blue yonder, and then just as it lost momentum and started to plummet towards the adjacent dockside, a pair of wings sprung from the casing along with a small propellor which immediately started to spin, and the Kimunicator stopped falling, then started a spiral climb into the sky. In due course it landed on top of a very tall dockyard crane, where it retracted it's wings and appeared to settle in for a long wait.

Kim picked up her suitcase and began to walk happily and nonchalantly along Ngong Wan Road towards the distant quayside marquee with the large multi-coloured flags fluttering above it. 'Spa treatments, expensive boutique shopping, a luxury cruise and then a chance to spend a few days safely indulging my favourite hobby in an island paradise; if more missions were like this one, this saving the world thing might get to be pretty popular! I'll have to remember all this next time I'm being eaten alive in some foul smelling swamp somewhere while people try to kill me… '. She reminded herself not to think about who was paying for all this hedonism, nor to think about the ever lengthening list of unpleasant things that she had compartmentalised away for now and that would all be waiting for her to deal with when she got home, lest she ruined her whole 'dream vacation' vibe.

She had, at least, timed her arrival perfectly; the flap on the tent was being opened up for the day just as she approached...

oOo

As Kim walked into her reception centre, at one minute past nine in the morning Hong Kong time, she was entirely unaware that Ron was climbing into a leather-upholstered mini-van with blacked out windows at the foot of Mount Yamanouchi in Japan, and setting out on the journey to an almost identical centre just across the harbour from her.

It had started as a typical morning at Yamanouchi, which is to say 'at 5 AM'. Ron, who had managed to get an almost reasonable amount of sleep despite his revelatory nocturnal adventures, was re-united with Rufus in the mess hall over breakfast. There was only time for one more training session before they needed to leave for the airport, and Ron's assumption that his imminent departure would preclude his participation proved hopelessly optimistic.

Sensei had been waiting for him when he left the mess hall. "Master Stoppable, in ancient times before a Monkey Master left Yamanouchi to do duty as a guardian of Sosumiha there was a set of tests he was expected to have already passed. Of those tests, it seems you also have passed all but one, and it seems a pity not to complete them all for the sake of tradition. Therefore, Master Stoppable, I have taken the liberty...".

Ron had been less than amused at learning that it was 'his honour' to spend an hour in the main courtyard being soaked by the freezing early morning rain and wearing a blindfold, while the entire student body and all the faculty each got the chance to throw a very sharp spear at him to wish him on his way; nevertheless, the mystical monkey power was more than equal to the task, judging by the lack of spear holes in Toshimiru's imposing physique.

Now, though, he was back in his own body, and wearing the previously exploded clothes he had arrived at Yamanouchi wearing, over his incredible expanding Shinobi Shozeki. They had been painstakingly stitched back together by somebody (Ron hadn't asked who) at Yamanouchi but were designed to come apart again in exactly the same way they had before, next time they were put under pressure, this time without the pain though.

It was four minutes after eight in the morning, Japanese time, when the mini-van pulled away from the kerb, with Ron, Rufus and Sensei sitting together in the facing back seats. As they drove towards the Expressway, Sensei handed Ron the key to a secure left luggage locker in the main terminal at Hong Kong Chek Lap Kok, where he could leave his Ron Stoppable identity behind temporarily and collect a wooden travel trunk containing Saru Chonoryouko's rather unimaginative luggage, which had been shipped on ahead. From there, he simply needed to take a taxi to the reception centre mentioned on the invitation, and the first, if least difficult and risky phase of the operation would have been a success.

It was all going exceedingly well. Until, directly after they joined the Expressway towards the airport, they ground to a dead halt, locked into three lanes of completely stationary traffic…

oOo

Shego meanwhile was approaching Hong Kong in the pilot's seat of the Tajiri oil minister's Airbus A340-8000, having used almost all of the plane's 8,000 mile cruise range in order to misdirect the attentions of it's overly inquisitive owner. Even now, Shego knew, a very expensively assembled crack surveillance team would be looking at their watches in Vancouver and fidgeting, wondering when she, or her alter ego at least, was going to arrive, while she was about to briefly appear on almost the very opposite side of the world, and then vanish into thin air before their employer's client, the Sheikh, could do anything about it. She yawned expansively. She had made a point of getting a good night's sleep in the desert the previous night, and she had been able to take the odd catnap while the plane cruised through lightly trafficked Chinese airspace on automatics, but she would still be happy when she could find a bed. Even if everything went to plan, that would be a few hours away. If it didn't, who knew when she might be able to sleep again?

She was about an hour out from touching down at Hong Kong when she decided it was time to try to save the Sheikha's legend for another day. She reached for the PA microphone, called the main cabin and proceeded to explain to the entire crew in terms that if they told anybody that the Sheikha Mustaffa had flown the Oil Minister's flying palace all the way from the Emirate of Tajiristan to Hong Kong, they would not be believed and would be at best fired for lying, at worst… well, the Emirate had fairly crude standards of 'justice' to say the least. If by any chance, they were believed, Shego further explained, then they would be fired or worse for dereliction of duty instead of sedition, but the outcome would be the same. But if they said nothing, nobody would ever be any the wiser about what had happened and they would keep their jobs and all live happily ever after. Obviously she laid it on pretty thickly, but she had logic on her side, and she was banking on the fact that the crew of the oil minister's flying palace were not particularly stupid, and thus unlikely to turn self-destructive tattle-tale for no reward. Shego knew that the Sheikh had no interest in seeing her dead, since her death would very likely lead to his own death very shortly thereafter, that meant that if one of the crew did talk to the Sheikh, it wouldn't be Shego who regretted it. However, the merest hint shared more widely that the Sheikha might not be who she claimed to be would invite scrutiny that she was currently able to entirely avoid, just by virtue of who people assumed she was, and who they assumed her husband was (i.e. the notoriously fickle oil minister of a small autocratic kleptocracy with 10% of the world's known oil reserves, distributed more or less at his whim) . At the moment, everybody's main focus was on not doing anything to the Sheikha that might offend the Sheikh. It wouldn't take much to start customs and immigration officials asking themselves 'Who is under that Burkha?' and at that point, the Sheikha would be a busted flush for her in future.

After a while, she carefully popped the breakers for the satellite phones and the on-board internet connection back in, and kept her fingers crossed.

Half an hour later, just as she was beginning her descent, she called the Captain to the cabin-crew phone and told him to come to the cockpit. When he knocked on the door, Shego let him in, dressed once again in the full Burkha and silk gloves she had worn when she had boarded the plane, and then ushered him to the commanders chair. "Please, have your aeroplane, Captain", said Shego in Arabic, as she arranged herself in the jump seat. " We are just approaching Hong Kong - the approach plate is on your table there. We have been cleared down to Flight Level zero-seven-five for now, we have a landing slot with no hold expected, and fuel is comfortably above minima. You'll find that Air Traffic Control are convinced they have been talking to you all through this trip not to me, and that you filed the change to the flight plan that bought us here not long after we took off. Don't question it, just accept it. I don't think there is anything else you need to know that you can't work out for yourself, so I'm going back to sit in the more comfortable seats now…"

The Captain was as white as a sheet and clearly had trouble processing what he was hearing, but he sensibly elected to just roll with the punches and get on with it for the sake of his continued career. It seemed that he'd be landing the plane alone (or at least monitoring the auto-land alone), though, because as he explained to Shego, the co-pilot, a good Muslim who had never touched alcohol in his life, had come to the conclusion the previous evening that with a supposedly completely uneducated, illiterate peasant _woman_ flying the plane, he would be dead by morning, and decided to make sure it wouldn't hurt by quaffing the Sheikh's expensive single malt in quantity. Or, as Shego said reassuringly to the Captain, "You mean surely that he was struck down with a bad case of food poisoning just before landing? That's what I heard you say, anyway…".

The die was cast now, they would certainly be landing in Hong Kong , whatever else the crew decided to do individually or collectively later; there was no fuel to go anywhere else! Shego had done all she could, and she thought on balance that she had probably done enough, so she gathered her luggage and headed back to the opulent luxury of her stateroom, past various members of crew who tended to stare at her wide-eyed as she passed them. She locked her door behind her and headed for the bed. There was just time for one final catnap before they landed…

oOo

On the Kowloon side of Victoria Harbour, ignored by the bustling lighters and barges, bypassed by the scudding sampans and water taxis, a giant bulk carrier floated unnoticed at anchor amongst the other ships in harbour . A particularly observant merchant shipping spotter might have noticed that 'Arenesto Dawn', nominally out of Panama, showed less lights at night than the average ship moored in the harbour, or that it's dual anchor chains were rustier and encrusted with more weed than those of other ships moored nearby, but on any given day it looked to the casual observer just like every other ship in the harbour. Only the fact that it hadn't moved from the same spot for 18 months made it obvious that it was, in fact, mothballed until there was enough cargo available to make it worth crewing and putting back into trade. Until then, it languished at anchor in Victoria Harbour, 'crewed' only by a single caretaker, whose job was to ensure that nobody 'borrowed' any vital components, or indeed the entire ship, as it sat otherwise unguarded in the middle of the busy port.

Anybody observing the vessel this day would have noticed the caretaker standing on the starboard bridge wing of the dark and silent bulk carrier, peering across the busy waters of Victoria Harbour with a pair of battered binoculars.

But they would have been mistaken. The caretaker was still in bed in the Captain's cabin below, fast asleep under the influence of a powerful narcotic. Only his jacket, binoculars and woolly hat were up on the bridge wing at present, and they were currently being modelled by Agent Du, Will Du, crack Global Justice covert operative. He was paying particular attention to one particular sampan that moved slowly through the congested waters of the harbour, powered quaintly by paddle alone, and which carried a striking red-headed teenager sitting cross-legged on the prow.

In due course, the sampan pulled alongside the rearmost of the line of four junks, and Agent Du watched until Kim Possible and her distinctly up-market suitcase were safely aboard. As the sampan headed back whence it came, Will Du headed into the wheelhouse, and spoke quietly into his sleeve.

"Rapier calling Irish Eyes, Rapier calling Irish Eyes, the vixen is in the hen-house, repeat, the vixen is now in the hen-house. Over!"

Then he put his index finger into his ear and appeared to listen for a moment, before once again speaking into his sleeve.

"Roger, Rapier Out!".

Then he headed back down to the Captain's cabin, replaced the jacket, woolly hat and binoculars on the hooks where he had earlier found them, then donned the flippers, tank and mask he had stashed here when he had first arrived before dawn.

Ten minutes later, he was sliding rapidly, arm over arm, down the forward anchor chain, and disappearing with barely a splash beneath the filthy waters of Victoria Harbour.

oOo

'This is bad' thought Ron. They hadn't moved for forty-five minutes , which was coincidentally more than their entire margin of error for making Ron's flight to Hong Kong. Sensei had been making phone calls from the car for the last half an hour; apparently GSM sometimes trumps astral projection in a crisis. It turned out that there had been a series of minor earthquakes a little earlier that morning near Mount Hamkenjutsi and they had closed the expressway while highway engineers inspected it for structural damage. It looked like Ron wouldn't be making his flight, or the tournament, but Sensei was busy trying to cobble together an emergency 'Plan B'.

After a little while, the back to back conversations Sensei was having seemed to become slightly less desperate and slightly more business-like; it seemed that the without access to the cuff's innate fluency in old high Japanese, the few words and partial phrases that Ron had learnt to try to modernise Saru Chonoryouko's archaic use of language were of no more use than a dozen pieces of a 1,000 piece jigsaw might be in seeing the bigger picture, so Ron had no idea what Sensei had in mind, but he was all ears when Sensei eventually spoke to him in English…

"Master Stoppable, members of our alumni association will hold the plane on the ground by subterfuge until you arrive. If you leave your own luggage with me, I will have it shipped back to your home in Middleton. Hirotaka-San will be here in a few minutes. Carry only the essentials you will need to get to Hong Kong. You must don the hood of your Shinobi-Shozeki and wear the cuff of Sosumiha for the trip to the airport. But please remove the pants and sweater first, Master Stoppable, you will need them in one piece for your flight. Roll them up and secrete them inside your Shinobi-Shozeki, along with your passport, the tickets and the key to the left luggage locker. You must also secrete the Lotus Blade about your person. Quickly, we do not have much time…".

A few minutes later, the roar of a powerful motorcycle with a distinctly non-stock exhaust system heralded Hirotaka's arrival alongside the mini-van, between the van's sliding side door and the curtain-sided trailer of an 18-wheeler that provided a little cover for Ron as he hopped out. He came face to face with Hirotaka-san wearing a black visor, black helmet and black armoured leather astride a very large gloss-black bike. "Stoppable-San!" he said, and handed Ron a helmet that he had been carrying over his elbow, but it was no good - Toshimiru's head was just too damned big, so the unused helmet was quickly deposited in the mini-van with Ron's luggage, and he slung his leg over the back of the bike. It was only as he was putting his feet on the pillion pegs that he started wondering what make and model of machine it actually was, and then he was tapping Hirotaka-San on the shoulder and saying "OK, Go….Wooooaaaah!"; Hirotaka-San dropped the clutch and gave the throttle a good tweak, discovering in the process what approaching 300lbs of muscle hanging over the tailpiece of his bike would do to front-rear equilibrium, as he wheelied at speed for about a hundred metres between the lanes of stationary traffic, stopping the bike flipping with judicious use of the back brake, before dropping the front wheel gently back on to the tarmac so that Ron could use the leverage of the top of his feet under Hirotaka's armpits to regain a sitting position. Ron eventually put his feet back on the pillion pegs, then shuffled forward and secured a decent hold on both the tank and the grab-rail behind him.

'Oh man… I should be doing the riding', thought Ron. 'That way I might get to the airport alive!'.

As Hirotaka was winding the bike noisily into the power band in third gear, and as he jinked left and right to snake between the haphazardly arranged lines of immobile cars, trucks and vans, Ron was having yet another jaw-dropping flashback, reminding him of something he had experienced the previous night… 'I wonder if this is real' he thought, "...because if it is, that would be sooooo cool...".

At that moment, the bike shot out from between the queuing cars, jinked around a couple of plastic road cones and shot past a motorcycle cop who had apparently just been woken up by the cacophonous scream of the unbaffled exhaust on Hirotaka's steed. A few seconds later, with Hirotaka winding it up through the gears, the throttle pinned wide open, and the front wheel pawing the air at each gear change, they blew past two more cones, shaved the top layer of paint off a small van, and then shot in between a man with a theodolite and his assistant with inches to spare, leaving them both sitting on the tarmac wondering what just happened. Ron noticed, when he looked around, that the moto cop who had been holding back the traffic was now in hot pursuit, although Ron doubted that a police spec VFR-800 had a chance of catching them on 25 miles of empty expressway, given a suitably throttle-happy rider on… what was this… a big Kawasaki, Ron guessed? He may only ride a tiny scooter, but in his mind's eye he was a fearless biker on an iron horse , and he entertained himself drooling over all the high-performance motorcycles he would be buying any day now to replace the scooter. Any day being a date related to the point where his parents throwing him out of the house for buying a 'death machine' (as actuaries are often wont to describe the bikes their relatives are about to buy themselves) wouldn't inconvenience him too much, and then just as soon as he invented another fast food phenomenon that would allow him to pay for it...

He wasn't wondering about the manufacturer and model of Hirotaka's bike for more than half a second though, because the earthquake had obviously caused some 'rippling' of the road surface, which was… more than a little unpleasant at... he glanced… 160 mph and climbing... on a bike where the rear suspension preload was still set up for Hirotaka on his own, rather than Hirotaka plus two normal men on the tailpiece; his internal organs bouncing off his rib-cage wasn't the nicest sensation, but at least he was now firmly locked to the bike and unlikely to fly off the back, he reflected. Another source of unpleasantness was the ever increasing wind-blast on his helmetless, if hooded, face, although ducking down behind Hirotaka as best he could helped a little with that. He found looking backwards more comfortable, at least for his eyes, so he was able to see the VFR-800P he had first identified vanish into the distance, and then two more joined the expressway just behind the... 'Hey! Ninja's on a Ninja! Cool!'..., red lights flashing in perfect if coincidental synchronisation, and then also faded backwards into the far distance. A helicopter had obviously been waiting over the expressway to pick them up and continue the chase as they rocketed towards the airport, and Ron yelled 'Helicopter!' to Hirotaka to warn him of the hovering spy in the sky; he might as well have whispered for all the good it did at 160mph. Nevertheless, Hirotaka did in due course suddenly stretch the throttle cable tight; Ron realised that he must have looked in his mirrors, which Ron had earlier noticed were equipped with little circular stick-on convex blind-spot mirrors that covered the sky as well as the more conventional lateral blind-spots. At something close to 190mph, even with over 500lb of well muscled and decidedly un-aerodynamic cargo aboard, the top speed of Hirotaka's bollide was clearly sufficient to pull away from the presumably police helicopter in a straight line, but even the slightest curve saw the chopper cut the corner and start to reel them in. At 180mph+, with Hirotaka-san hunched behind the low screen as far as possible, and Ron unable to fold his massive body into the small space remaining behind him on the pillion seat without vanishing off the back of the bike, merely staying in place became a workout and a half, as the buffeting battered his body, pummelled his face and tried to tear his head off if he lifted it a millimetre from Hirotaka's back. Only his vice like grip on the grab rail, and now round Hirotaka's waist prevented him from bouncing down the road behind the bike, a receding dot in Hirotaka's mirrors himself! At 180mph even gentle expressway curves become hugely challenging corners as Hirotaka had to shift weight to the inside in order not to run out of ground clearance with the softly suspended behemoth and catapult them both into the central divider at "strawberry jam" speed, leaving Ron to have to choose between moving his own huge bodyweight to the inside which might help Hirotaka keep the engine cases off the expressway, and staying where he was, thus avoiding unsettling the bike and provoking a loss of grip or control. When Hirotaka was hanging off the motorcycle in one corner at in excess of 190 mph indicated, with his knee, ankle and boot sliders all smoking away as they were burnt through by the fast moving asphalt, and with occasional showers of sparks indicating that the very solid left hand exhaust collector was lightly skimming the road surface, the decision was made for him; he either hung off in unison with Hirotaka in future fast corners, or hit the concrete divider right next to him when Hirotaka managed to lever the back tyre off the ground! Then, through streaming eyes, he saw something that looked suspiciously like it might be a Nissan GTR, but covered in red and blue flashing lights, join the expressway a quarter of a mile behind them and started to reel them very slowly in even at over a ton-eighty mph.

The car had eaten up maybe half its initial distance deficit when Hirotaka-san suddenly peeled up an exit slip road, stood the bike on its nose on the brakes, and started jinking through heavy traffic once again, heading in to the airport, at which point the ultra high performance police car that had been chasing them down might as well have been a school bus. However, in its place two more VFR800P's joined the chase, and in this tight, congested traffic slalom space they had the legs on Hirotaka's big black beast, the police pilots skillfully lobbing their smaller lighter charges from scraping one engine protection bar to dragging the other, sirens wailing and red lights flashing, as they ate up the gap between themselves and Hirotaka-san's back wheel hand over fist. And then, just as it looked like they might be caught, as the two expertly ridden Hondas jinked up the right hand side of an airport bus directly behind them, Hirotaka suddenly turned sharp left, left the road and shot down a pedestrian underpass, spinning the back wheel around on the throttle at the bottom of the first half of the wheelchair ramp and then shooting back under the road and off up a pedestrian walkway towards the airport terminal. Apparently Hirotaka had successfully hung the two bike cops out to dry in traffic and at the vital moment they just hadn't been able to get into the pedestrian underpass for a few tens of seconds, just enough time that suddenly Hirotaka was turning sharp left again and they were bouncing down a set of steps into a dark service tunnel. At which point he jammed the brakes on, elbowed Ron hard in the ribs and said "Good luck, Stoppable-san", before dropping the clutch again and roaring off almost from under him as he staggered backwards. Within a handful of seconds, he was effectively invisible, employing the dark arts of the Stone Monkey to blend seamlessly into the shadows at the base of the concrete tunnel wall, as two Honda VFR-800P's bounced down the steps and shot past, V4 engines roaring, red beacons flashing and sirens wailing, in pursuit of Hirotaka's tyre-smoking progress.

Less than a minute later, a blond haired gaijin kid in cargo pants and a sweater climbed the steps out of the service tunnel, looked up curiously at the police helicopter circling overhead, and waved cheerily. The camera operator on the helicopter took one look at him, and aimed the camera away towards the other end of the service tunnel on the grounds that he bore no physical resemblance whatsoever to either of the individuals on the recklessly ridden motorcycle. The helicopter shot off towards the other end of the tunnel, and Ron followed the pedestrian path towards the terminal and the nine AM flight to Hong Kong, currently showing as 'boarding delayed' for the last 45 minutes due to a small technical fault that was shortly going to be miraculously resolved.

oOo

Just as Ron's plane was turning on to the active runway and lining up for take-off, with the man himself looked disinterestedly at the in-flight magazine and worried about Hirotaka-san's fate, the Sheikha Mustapha was climbing into an embassy limousine having just left the airport terminal in Hong Kong via the VIP entrance.

Now she sat alone in the back of the bullet-proof Bentley, with a chauffeur in front, the Tajiri Ambassador in a similar chauffeur driven limousine in front of them, embassy bodyguards in a car behind, royal pennants of the House of Tajiri flying from the wings of all the cars, and two motorcycle outriders from the Hong Kong police leading the way with sirens blaring, clearing a path through the traffic as best they could manage. This counted as a low key welcome from the embassy. 'Hiding in plain sight' thought Shego. She had only called the embassy to forewarn them of her arrival and request a limo to take her to her destination, fifteen minutes before they had actually landed; by now the Sheikh would know that she wasn't flying in to Vancouver, but there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

In due course, after a long drive into Kowloon, the convoy pulled into the driveway of an exclusive private clinic. Shego stepped out of her limo, walked up to the ambassadors ' limousine and tapped on his bullet proof window. When it slid down, Shego said 'Mr Ambassador, thank you for meeting me. I trust I am assured of your complete discretion?'. Shego was, of course, none too subtly hinting that the Sheikha's visit to the clinic was related to some medical condition that might bring great embarrassment to the nation. He nodded his assent, and Shego said 'Please return to the embassy, I will be in contact if I need assistance…', and then walked back to her own limo to collect her luggage from the embassy chauffeur-bodyguard. By the time she was checking in to the clinic, and filling in the admissions forms using a disposable identity, the convoy was half-way back to the Tajiri embassy. Shego had paid for a private room in advance for a fortnight via the same one-shot disposable identity she had booked the room with but she didn't intend to be there for a single one of the colonic irrigation sessions she had scheduled for herself. In fact, as soon as she was inside the private room in question, she closed the blinds, and pulled off the Burkha, though not the white silk gloves. The Burkha went on a hanger in the wardrobe, and then she pulled a green hold-all out of the big suitcase. Firing up her finger, she erased the gold 'Diplomatic Bag' legend from the attaché case, and then pulled the small laptop out of the bigger suitcase, popped the solid state disk drive out of it, and headed for the en-suite bathroom, where she melted the CCD drive containing all the evidence of her flight plan shenanigans into charcoal and flushed the resulting ash down the toilet. Then she looked in the mirror and checked that the bandages swathing her head were in good order, and that the visible plastic splint around her nose was also still in position. Then, heading back to the well appointed private room, she pulled a silk robe out of the big suitcase, and dropped the entirely untraceable remnants of the laptop back into it. Finally she gave everything a good blast of 'bye-bye fingerprints' and donned the silk robe, checking as she did so to confirm that the small electric screwdriver was still in the pocket. Next, she threw the holdall and the attaché case up on top of the wardrobe, and was about to hop up after them when she remembered that she was still not quite 100% yet and therefore shouldn't push her luck unless she absolutely had to, so she climbed up to join the slightly rationalised luggage via the window sill. She took a quick glance at her watch, which told her that she still had ten minutes to reach the ambulance bay downstairs, where she was scheduled for a patient transfer to another hospital for a revision to a failed nose job under yet another disposable identity. She had three more elaborate 'Russian Doll' games lined up before she headed to the reception centre, and that should be more then enough misdirection to lose the Sheikh's hired sleuths when they eventually turned up in Hong Kong to look for her.

But for now, she had nine minutes to complete a short drop down two floors via the ventilation shaft behind the grill she was about to remove, and then three more floors via a disused laundry chute straight to the ambulance bay. She gave the electric screwdriver a quick 'whizz' and turned her attention to the screws securing the grill…

oOo

The mobile phone rang loudly and rudely, sharing the theme from classic 1970's Britcop series 'The Sweeney' with both occupants of the double bed in the tiny bedsit in Clapham. At first nobody stirred. The phone rang out, and then very quickly started ringing again. One occupant of the bed snored loudly. The other hid under the duvet and tried to ignore the cacophony. Eventually, a tousled and bleary eyed peroxide-blonde head appeared from under the covers, and a female voice said 'Shut the fuck UP!', testily. The owner of the voice, sometime exotic dancer and in recent years, on and off barmaid at the Dog and Firkin, scrabbled for the bedside lamp and eventually succeeded in turning it on. But only after she had variously knocked cigarettes, lighter, an empty wine glass and a half full ashtray onto the floor, and sworn again. Then, she lent over the side of the bed, towards the source of the music; the phone had stopped ringing and then restarted _yet again_. She groaned and dived into the pile of clothing, tossing aside a leopard-skin print nylon thong, the matching lycra body, a pair of skinny jeans and a wonder-bra, until she came to a pair of cheap suit trousers. She found the phone in one of the pockets, and held down the power button until it shut down, and more importantly from her point of view, stopped ringing. Then she stuffed it back in the pocket and dropped the trousers on the floor, turned the bedside lamp off, and rolled back under the duvet. She hadn't been planning on bringing company home tonight, especially not company that would cost her sleep by having a mobile phone that some arsehole would ring him on at 2 am, but the copper laying alongside her had a cheeky grin and a marvellous way with words. Also, crumpled, careworn, horny and rat-arsed was admittedly very rarely an attractive combination, but Foster carried it off _so_ well that she was standing next to her own bed and clasping his drunken head between her ample and freshly released bosoms while he made a very childish raspberry noise and shook his head vigorously from side to side, before she even remembered that she needed to be up early (for her) the next morning.

She noticed that the snoring had stopped, and opened her eyes again. A roguishly attractive, if somewhat bleary-eyed face had appeared in front of her. "Morning Gorgeous'", said DI Foster. "Can't get enough of me, can you Dawn?".

'It's Maria, not Dawn, you tactless tosser!', thought Maria. 'Dawn got homesick and moved back to Newcastle, and I'm obviously helping out at the pub by temporarily filling the vacancy she left in more ways than one!', but she didn't say anything out loud. And then she felt his warm hand sliding insidiously into the still damp sticky void between her legs, as he breathed beery fumes over her and she realised that yes, since she was awake now, another bang from the forces of law and order would be both quite good fun _and_ would help her get back to sleep.

She grinned lecherously, gently grasped his balls and began to fondle them, pulled herself towards him across the bed and kissed him enthusiastically. "Open Wide!", said Foster, with only a slight slur to his voice now, as he rolled her onto her back and gently prised her legs apart with his knee.

"No you don't, you cheeky bastard, haven't you ever heard of foreplay?", she asked, in a slightly peeved tone, not that she stopped fondling his nuts or tried to close her legs. "Heard of it, yeah!", he grinned impishly as he positioned himself between her thighs. "But my boat seems to do the trick just as well…"

'The trick?', she thought. 'What trick? Do you mean that your boat… err… boat race, face… is enough to get me wet enough and turned on enough that I am actually looking _forward_ to being penetrated by an unreconstructed Neanderthal throwback like you, without _any_ kind of basic warm-up action or common fucking courtesy? I'm amazed that people like you even still exist! What the hell did my mother burn her bra for anyway?'

She scooched down the bed slightly, opened her legs just a little further and tilted her hips back to give him easier access, as she reached forward with her mouth and kissed the end of his nose provocatively.

'This is utterly ridiculous! It's obviously that fanny-dampeningly cheeky grin that does it...' , she thought...

oOo

It was around two in the afternoon when the taxi driver helped the hideously burned blind woman out of his taxi at the dockside. She thanked him very politely in mandarin, and gave him a reasonable tip, as she unfolded her white stick. He had picked her up outside the main shopping centre on Hong Kong Island, where she stood at the kerb with her attaché case and pink holdall, hopefully holding up a cardboard sign stuck to her white 'feeler' that said 'Taxi'. She wore a long sleeved, floral smock dress that obviously hid a great many terrible burn scars, judging by the compression bandages she wore on her horribly contorted hands and covering her face, not to mention the fact that she also wore all but opaque dark glasses and carried a white stick, making it blatantly obvious that whatever hideous calamity had befallen her had obviously taken her sight. He had of course been curious about what had happened to her, who wouldn't be? But it's not a question you'd ever feel comfortable asking, so of course he didn't. Four minutes after he drove away, a businessman in a suit flagged him down, and the old burnt blind woman evaporated completely from his mind, just like the ten thousand fares before her...

oOo

Shego tapped and swept her way with the white stick towards the reception desk, remaining 'in character' and then presented her invitation to the young man behind the desk.

"La Comptesse?" he asked.

"Oui!", she replied. Then "Yes…" with a heavy French accent when he looked blank. She saw him tapping away at a laptop ,obviously recording the fact that 'La Comptess D'Aurigny' had checked in, and out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of a flight case with a network switch and a router in, so she surmised that anybody who wanted to know when she arrived would now know.

She was guided quickly through the scanning arches, remaining once again in character, and waited while her attache case and hold-all were scanned. There was a minor delay when the tiny ear-bud she had used to listen in on the bug she had planted in Sheikh Mustaffa' s desk phone triggered an alarm, but fortunately Shego had tucked it into an outside pocket of the pink holdall (which she has stuffed inside a green holdall, and then jammed into the expensive suitcase) and then forgotten all about it, so it was easily retrieved at her direction, to be smashed by Lo-Pins flashily attired guards and dropped into the harbour, before the luggage was re-scanned.

Then, after a short wait, it was aboard a traditional sampan, which set off on a slow and somewhat sea-tossed meander across Victoria harbour, with her still playing up to her cameo as a badly burned blind woman; she chose to make the trip as much as possible below the gunwales of the sampan, so that the minimum number of people saw much of her as the little vessel made stately progress across the harbour. 'Atmospheric… quaint… and a complete waste of time..', thought Shego dismissively, as they were tossed around by the choppy waters of Victoria Harbour, and forced to take a very indirect meandering route across the water to avoid being run over by any one of a hundred larger and/or faster vessels.

Shego was pretty sure that nobody around here, with the obvious exception of Lo Pin, knew that she was even alive, let alone in a small traditional wooden boat in the middle of an open expanse of water in Hong Kong (now that she had checked in, she knew that Lo Pin and at least some of his minions would know exactly where she was, so if she was wrong about all this, and this was merely a massively over elaborate attempt to kill her then right now would be the time when she found out; if she made it aboard one of the junks they were clearly heading towards without having to dodge bomb, bullet or being run over by a super-tanker then clearly there was more afoot than a mere crude assassination).

Eventually, the little sampan pulled alongside the leading junk of the four; this encouraged Shego - she had assumed that Lo Pin or whoever spoke for him would want to talk to Shego as much as she wanted to talk to Lo Pin, and she would have placed bets on Lo Pin, if he was here, being based aboard the lead ship in the little moored flotilla, even though the four junks looked identical to each other.

Actually, describing them as junks was probably not according these vessels the respect they deserved, thought Shego. She was passingly familiar with the modern single masted incarnation of the traditional Chinese junk, and from a distance these four-masted vessels looked very similar to the smaller but still large sailing vessels one could watch puttering about Victoria Harbour under motor power. Only when Shego got closer did it become clear that these vessels were far, far larger than the junks she had seen close up on the way out here. These were, in fact, monsters, and while there was a great deal of hardwood and traditional design in the ship her sampan was now being lashed to, there were clearly more modern materials and technology not far under the skin. The rows of large portholes along the flanks hinted at cabins, or perhaps staterooms, behind them. Shego could see automatic electric winches at the foot of various ropes, and the ropes themselves seemed to be something other than either traditional hemp or nylon. These were junks on steroids!

One of the two boatmen passed her two bags to a junk crewman who was dressed in similar style to the security crew back at the reception centre, and he immediately scampered away up the steps attached to the landing stage that was hanging against the side of the ship. The boatman then guided "blind" Shego to the steps over the gunwale of the sampan, and handed her over to a second crewman, who pulled her safely onto the platform by the arm. She thanked both parties in English in her best manufactured French accent, while looking vacantly into the middle distance, and allowed herself to be guided up the steps, and onto the deck. Once there, another crewman waited for her, although again she remained in character and feigned ignorace of his presence, as she unfolded her white stick, thanking the crewman who had helped her up the steps.

The patiently waiting crewman held his tongue until she had unfolded the multi-segmented white feeler and then spoke… "Bienvenue à bord, la comtesse, Monsieur Lo Pin a été désespéré de vous rencontrer. Puis-je vous montrer à sa cabine et de vous présenter?". Without skipping a beat, Shego replied "Merci beaucoup, jeune homme. Vous n'avez aucune idée à quel point je suis impatient de rencontrer Monsieur Lo Pin. S'il vous plaît avance sur! Est-ce que quelqu'un d'apporter mes sacs pour moi?". Her guide bowed slightly and then spoke quickly in Mandarin, tasking one of the two duty gangway crew members to carry La Comptesse d'Aurigny's bags. The 'greeter' then skilfully guided an ostensibly blind Shego towards the stern of the vessel, successfully preventing her from walking into any of the ship's rigging or other obstacles, yet doing so without either manhandling her or appearing to be overly attentive. Shego suspected that despite the DragonFist gi, this guy was probably Lo Pin's butler, and by the looks of him, a very well trained butler at that!

In due course they arrived at a door set into the front of the raised poop deck and the greeter/butler knocked on the door. A commanding voice emanated from the intercom and said "Yes?" in Mandarin. "La Comptesse D'Aurigny is here, Sir!", said 'the Butler'. "Ah… EXCELLENT! Please show her in, and then leave us alone!".

"Yes, sir!", said the chap who Shego was ever more convinced was Lo Pin's butler. He opened the door to her employer's cabin and showed her over the threshold, before saying '... et vos sacs sont là, Madame la comtesse ...', obviously having taken her bags from the temporarily press-ganged porter and deposited them just inside the door.

A deep booming voice said, with a barely detectable chinese accent, "Aha! Bonjour, Madam la Comptesse! ". As she looked for the source of the words, the room suddenly darkened significantly as the blinds flicked closed en masse. When half a second later the artificial lights came on. Shego's dark glasses lay where she had been standing just inside the door, while she herself was halfway across the room in a low defensive stance.

She relaxed but only slightly, as Lo Pin's booming laugh filled the large cabin and Shego finally spotted him sitting at a large desk at the far end of the cabin. "A thousand apologies, La Comptesse… or should I call you Ms Go? I thought you would appreciate the discretion afforded by the blinds. That disguise must be… quite uncomfortable!".

Shego raised an eyebrow. "Actually, yes I do, and yes it is uncomfortable. And it is definitely _not_ Ms Go! Shego is just fine. For my friends and enemies alike."

"Very well, Shego it is. Please, please, come and sit down, relax. I imagine that you have some questions?", said Lo Pin.

Shego did indeed have some questions. She pulled herself upright, anxious not to betray the pain that the instinctive dive and roll had caused to bloom in her right shoulder and left thigh. Still, she didn't seem to have set her recovery back any, and the pain was receding quickly. She walked warily over to her bags, keeping one eye on Lo Pin as she did so, then headed back towards Lo Pin, making a conscious effort not to limp. In front of Lo Pin's large desk she found a large and very inviting couch, so she deposited the holdall and the attache case in front of it and then sat herself down on the comfortable soft leather, arranging herself decorously, and trying to appear relaxed, though inwardly she was still a coiled spring.

"Please, may I offer you a drink, Shego?", asked Lo Pin. Shego eyed him critically. He wasn't in the first flush of youth, with a mane of white hair that Shego was sure was natural but made him look older than he actually was. He was a tall, imposing man in early middle-age, who looked to be in very good shape. He affected a very distinctive and long moustache, which in many contexts would have looked ridiculous, but seemed entirely appropriate for a man who had his own criminal empire, martial arts school and a blue-riband martial arts tournament. He wore a rather more ornate version of the gi worn by his guards, only in a very fetching crimson rather than pale blue.

"Maybe later, thank you", said Shego, evenly, as she pulled off the compression bandages on her hands and discarded the plastic splints she had used to temporarily hold her fingers into a deformed claw shape. Then she held her two hands up, fingers outstretched and there was the briefest flash of green flame as she disposed of the minimal make-up she had used on the exposed parts of her hand to both conceal the green tinge, and also to hint at further serious burn damage under the bandages. Then she asked "So… why am I here?".

"Shego, this year is the tenth anniversary of my establishing the Dragon Fist academy, after the tragic death of my father. It has always been my intention that this year I would invite the worlds greatest exponents of the martial arts to participate in my annual tournament, and it has equally been my ambition for as long as I have held that intention that you should be one of them. When I heard of your tragic death shortly before I was due to despatch the invitations, I was devastated. When I heard that there was a chance that you were still among the living, I was overjoyed, and I took immediate steps to invite you, in such a way that only you would receive the invitation. If I was wrong, and La Comptesse was somebody other than you, then you would not have seen the invitation. I was also aware that if it was you, you had gone to considerable effort not to announce your continued survival, and I did not want to do anything that might compromise that, partly out of common courtesy, and partly because I do not wish to attract the kind of attention to my tournament that your… overt… participation would bring. Also, there would be no point in inviting you if you either could not attend, or if my invitation were to result in… further unpleasantness for you. You can only die so many times before it becomes… permanent. I must say that until you checked in an hour ago, I really had no idea whether you were still alive, let alone whether you would accept my invitation. I am so very happy that you are here! You are clearly as resourceful as your reputation would suggest! ". He smiled winningly.

Shego smiled back, though she was inwardly scowling. "Well, I'm pleased that you are impressed. But I would very much like to know how you were able to find me."

"Ah… ", said Lo Pin knowingly. "To answer that, I must tell you something about the way that my… business... operates".

Shego allowed the silence to prevail for a few moments, looking expectant, before saying "Go on…", trying but failing to supress the faintest hint of irritation in her voice.

"As you may well imagine, information is the lifeblood of an organisation like mine…".

Shego continued to look expectant, and continued to smile pleasantly, but one of her eyebrows began to twitch slightly.

Lo Pin changed tack. "When a poor hacker wishes to create a legend for a false identity, they will often insert records into various databases to create a false history for their new identity. A better hacker will fix the data access logs to remove all trace of their activity. An outstanding hacker will construct logs and audit trails that simulate the contemporaneous update activities they wish to replicate. A world class hacker will ensure that all of the databases they touch are consistent with each other to the ultimate degree, and that there are no gaps in the legend that might allow a forensic investigation to spot the legend in computer databases by identifying what is missing rather than what is there. But the greatest hackers of all will use their resources to insert forged paper documentation into the historical record that support and reinforce the legend. The people who can do work of this quality are very few and far between indeed. La Comptesse d'Aurigny is a creation of rare and exquisite beauty, a masterpiece if you will. Her legend is so strong, so complete, that it would be absolutely impossible for a forensic investigation to identify a flaw. She is, in every respect, a real person, with substance. You are to be congratulated!"

"Thank you," said Shego icily. "But that raises the obvious question…",

"How did I know that La Comptess was a construct and that you were her architect? Because the one thing that no hacker, even the very greatest hacker, has access to is a time machine. Rather than looking forensically for inconsistencies in the historical record, we have taken a different approach. Data mining. On an unprecedented scale. Uniquely, rather than merely hacking into databases around the world and analysing them to gain information, we capture them wholesale, often from archives and backups. But we do not do this just once. We do this repeatedly, and capture the entire database over time. In fact we have the capacity to hold a twelve Yottabyte global data archive…"

"Yottabyte?", asked Shego; this was not a quantifier she was familiar with.

"An Exabyte is a million Gigabytes. A Yottabyte is a million Exabytes. Our global scale data warehouse enables us to store online multiple complete historical snapshot copies of every database we have ever been able to access, and there are very few databases that we haven't been able to access. In theory we could have stored a daily snapshot of every significant computer database in the world since computer databases first became commonplace, and continue on into the future to do the same, effectively indefinitely. We have almost unlimited bandwidth and we hold unimaginably large quantities of data. We use this incredible resource to identify… business opportunities. But also threats to our organisation and our business activities. To that end, we have processes that identify retrospective additions to databases. Sometimes these signal attempts to infiltrate our organisation. Sometimes they signal attempts to conceal high value cargoes from us by altering manifests retrospectively. Sometimes they reveal fraud or smuggling or other skullduggery by people on the inside, who we can then blackmail to do our bidding instead of their own. Often the retrospective changes that we are alerted to by our monitoring processes are of no immediate use to us, but need to be investigated all the same. When, one day, La Comptesse d'Aurigny did not exist, and then a week later she had existed for the last 50 years, this was flagged up to us by our monitoring systems, and we understood immediately of course that she was a ghost. When we realised how exceptionally, indeed brilliantly well crafted the legend was, we knew that only a very select few of the most exceptional operators in the world could have created such a thing of beauty. Of course, with such a short list of suspects to chose from, it was easy to cross-reference the creation of the legend with your movements around the same time. I am afraid you were given away by your own brilliance, Shego. And of course, once we had made the association, we filed it away as of no immediate interest. And then, after your… untimely but ultimately unconfirmed demise, we were alerted via the same data analysis operation that La Comptesse was now suddenly active and generating live data. The conclusion we drew was an obvious one. I suspected… hoped... that you were... less dead than we had been led to believe, and acted accordingly."

"OK, I'm impressed…", said Shego.

"Thank you!", said Lo Pin smugly.

Clearly, thought Shego, Lo Pin's revelations were pretty worrying; if a database like that existed, somebody somewhere would find it and hack into it, and then she'd be completely screwed. She was pretty sure that Kim Possible's pet nerd would be into it in ten minutes and blowing every one of Shego's bolt holes wide open to all sorts of people she'd like to keep in the dark ten minutes after that, once he found out it existed, and for that reason alone, she would be very interested in causing the world's biggest head crash at some point in the reasonably near future. Although perhaps there was less urgency now, since clearly Lo Pin had known about La Comptesse, and probably all the rest of her carefully constructed legends, pretty much since they were created, and nothing had yet leaked out; the only thing that was new was that Shego now knew about Lo Pin's data mining operation. Although she wasn't sure what Lo Pin's wilingness to tell her all about it might mean; it did make her feel slightly uneasy, for reasons she couldn't quite place.

Anyway, now she thought about it, however Lo Pin was able to store twelve Yottabytes of data ('Yottabyte? Did Lo Pin just make that up?' wondered Shego, as an aside), she doubted that it would involve a billion Terabyte sized SCSI drives in racks in a cave on his island. She was pretty sure that that much disk storage hadn't actually ever been manufactured, you'd need a lot more floor space than the average tropical island gives you and the electricity and cooling requirements alone… sheesh. Then there was the bandwidth... Where the hell would you get that much bandwidth? Lots of questions, no obvious answers. On the other hand, now that she knew how he had done it, it became 'just' a problem to be solved rather than a sinister mystery.

Lo Pin's database would wait, she decided. Wait until she knew a lot more about it and how to shut it down at least. And until she had dealt with certain more pressing priorities, in Langley, Virginia, of course. That is, if Lo Pin wasn't about to do or say something that moved him up her priority list...

Shego did, however, feel confident enough that Lo Pin wasn't about to whip out a pistol and shoot her, to peel off the compression bandage covering her face, and its attached 'burnt head' hairpiece. Then she shook out her mane of black hair, which she had tucked up inside the mask.

"That's better…", she said absent mindedly. Then she added, less absent-mindedly, "A couple more things have been worrying me. First, these...".

Shego dived into her attaché case and emerged with the bracelets she had been sent in the parcel that had brought her here.

"What are they for?" she asked, sweetly. As if she didn't know.

"Ah!", sighed Lo Pin. "You may not be aware of this, Shego, but I have one very strict rule about firearms on my island, which is of course the venue for my tournament; they are strictly forbidden, on pain of death. A gun is a coward's weapon, for those utterly without honour. I cannot abide them and will not stand for them or those that use them!". As he spoke about the evil of guns, he became visibly more animated and passionate, and Shego sensed that he was sincere in that at least. Even the limited research as she been able to do as she travelled had revealed the fate of Lo Pin's father to her. "Of course, your… umm.. thing… with the hands… is not a gun. And you do not carry it by choice. But its power is similar, and I simply cannot allow it onto my island, for it makes a mockery of my strict rule against the presence of firearms. It would also give you an unfair advantage in the tournament."

"And the relevance of these?", she asked, feigning ignorance again as she held up the bracelets.

Lo Pin grinned, "Surely you have already discovered that they are made of Molybdenum Ferrucite, Shego?"

"Molybdenum... Ferrucite? What do you know about… Molybee Thingee? ", asked Shego, playing it dumb.

Lo Pin grinned again. "Nothing at all. I'd never heard of it. However, when I wanted to find a way of temporarily neutralising your… hand… thing… so that I could welcome you to participate in my tournament, I was able to use our data mine to look at what you might have been researching that might assist us. Of course, we were able to cross-reference your searches for information on Molybdenum Ferrucite with some security camera footage of a burglary at the Smithsonian Institute, and you had helpfully provided us with an answer yourself. So of course, you know all about Molybdenum Ferrucite."

"It is starting to come back to me now," said Shego drily. 'Damn it… Infosec!' she thought. It had been the evening of the museum job, in a draughty time share lair, one hand bandaged up with a meteorite sized hole burnt in it, and she hadn't felt like implementing a secure net environment from scratch, all while typing with one hand, before she could find out what the hell caused her to only have one hand free in the first place. 'What harm could a few random insecure web searches from who knows where for data about an obscure cosmic alloy do, anyway?' she had asked herself at the time, as she talked herself up to her own neck in the shit years later without ever even knowing it at the time. Self inflicted wounds hurt far more than any other kind…

"And if I don't fancy wearing your bracelets?", asked Shego.

"I would be very upset, Shego. But there will be sampans going back empty to all three reception centres for the rest of the day, and you are more than welcome to take a ride on any of them, with no recriminations on my part. I very much hope you chose not to."

"Really?", asked Shego, cynicism and disbelief radiating from every pore.

"Of course, Shego. I have no interest in making an enemy of you. I purely sought to invite you to participate in my tournament out of immense respect for your martial prowess. Having invited you here, turning you in to the authorities would be dishonourable in the extreme. And very bad for business. In my profession, people have to know that sometimes, only sometimes, they can trust me, or I would be left with nobody to negotiate cargo ransoms with. Believe me when I say that if you leave now, it will be to me as if you were never here. Perhaps if I extend a fresh invitation next year?", asked Lo Pin.

'Is he bluffing?', thought Shego. 'But the only way to find out is to leave and see if he tries to stop me. Or drops a dime on me. So I'm going to take that at face value for now...'.

"And these?", she asked.

"A gift!", he replied. "You are free to take them with you and to keep or dispose of them as you see fit. Please bring them back with you if you do intend to enter my tournament next year, though. I'm afraid there won't be any more; as I'm sure you are aware, the material is in... very limited supply."

"Yes, about that... this must be two thirds to three quarters of the world's total known Molybdenum Ferrucite. How did you obtain so many meteorites? And how were you able to smelt a workable metal from them?", asked Shego.

"For the first, I cheated, Shego. Or was uncommonly lucky. Once I knew what was needed to temporarily negate your... hand... thing..., I realised that there was a large meteorite on my island that, luck would have it, was made of Molybdenum Ferrucite. Some was lost as we struggled to develop our own smelting process on the island that would produce a workable metal without changing its properties, but eventually, the remainder of our very own meteorite plus two small rocks bought from a private Australian collector in Queensland yielded the metal you have in your hand. I estimate that that is therefore now about a third of the world stock. Although as you have observed, the rest is distributed in tiny quantities in meteorite exhibits and collections across approximately 400 museums and institutions world wide."

'Yes, but not for long', thought Shego. At some point in the not too distant future, she'd need to go on a little global road trip and replace a lot of Molybdenum Ferrucite meteorites in a lot of geological collections with expanded polystyrene replicas. With luck, by the time anybody had noticed that somebody had got their rocks off them, to coin a phrase, the 'originals' would all have been ground to dust, dust which would be sinking towards the bottom of the Marianas trench.

Although realistically, scheduling anything for after her forthcoming planned visit to Langley was... perhaps a trifle optimistic.

"And when were you proposing that I should allow you to weld those things on to me?", asked Shego.

"Oh, not before we reach the island. But definitely before you are allowed ashore, Shego. We will remove them the moment you leave the island." replied Lo Pin.

Shego considered her options. If she wanted to find out more about Lo Pin and his unimaginably giant database, she probably ought to accept the invitation. Although she had no idea whether the storage and bandwidth required really made it likely that the data mine was even on the island, and if she believed Lo Pin, which she was loath to do, she would be welcome to come back next year anyway. Which if she was honest with herself she doubted she'd be in any condition to do. And even assuming Lo Pin was sincere about letting her leave without any comebacks, she wasn't too keen about being dumped back in Hong Kong. She had about 24 hours give or take before Sheikh Mustaffa's hirelings turned up in force and started looking for her, and Hong Kong was too small a place to guarantee being able to dodge them, or to lose them easily once they had caught up with her. It was also too wired a place for her to be comfortable hiding from the full might of the US intelligence apparatus, and too hard a place to get out of without being tracked by somebody. She had always had the viable option of heading back to the clinic, reclaiming her Burkha, flying back to the Emirate and riding her invisible motorcycle all the way back to France, or indeed into another bolt-hole. But something within her rebelled at the idea of beating the crap out of herself and her battered body and taking risks the way she had to get here, only to turn round after a ten minute meeting and go back whence she came. Even if that did make most sense…

Lo Pin could clearly sense her indecision, and made a play to try to tip the scale in his favour. "Shego, I notice that you appear to be carrying an injury or two? I am aware of your extraordinary healing powers, and also aware that you are no doubt still playing dead because you wish to… surprise… somebody. I further therefore deduce from recent events that whoever it is you wish to surprise may be somebody involved in your... recent death. My tournament will give you somewhere… absolutely secure and discrete… to recuperate, to train, to hone your skills to a razor edge against the best of the best, before you pay them that visit. The facilities of Dragon Fist Academy will be at your disposal as an honoured guest and entrant in my tournament. "

What he said certainly made sense to Shego. A martial arts dojo at her disposal, and possibly some sparring partners to work through. Although she did inwardly scoff at the whole 'best of the best' thing. 'If you've found anybody to enter your tournament who is even a bit better than Little Miss Possible Prissy-knickers, then I'll be more than amazed. And I'll want their phone number, I'll be booking lessons with them myself! '.

Instead, she said "You make some good points, certainly. But tell me…", as Shego rent the floral print dress she was still wearing into two pieces in one easy ripping motion, revealing a somewhat sandy, and sweat-stained green and black cat-suit underneath it, then winced as her shoulder complained, "...how do you suggest I might participate in your tournament without the other participants spilling the beans after they leave and blowing my cover?".

She was already regretting the dramatic ripping motion, since if Lo Pin was about to say 'Oops, I never thought of that', she would need to construct a new disguise to get herself back to shore again.

"I thought long and hard about that, Shego. Once again, I turned to the expertise of my data miners, to look for a solution that would be both appropriate, and yet not in itself likely to reveal your identity. And...", said Lo Pin, standing up for the first time as he stepped over to the wall of the stateroom where it quickly became clear that one of the moulded panels was actually the door to a walk-in cupboard. Despite herself, Shego tensed as he reached in to the concealed cupboard. "...we came up with THIS!", Lo Pin continued, withdrawing his arm to reveal a coat-hanger containing a cream Shinobi-Shozeki . "It is surely a perfect time for the return of the White Ninja…".

Shego gasped, and grinned broadly, again despite herself. "Oh, you have done your research haven't you!", she said out loud. 'Of course…', she thought. 'The White Ninja, so called because she isn't a Ninja and the suit isn't white!', she remembered Amelia saying frequently, with a twinkle in her eye.

"I had several manufactured, to the same specification as the original, although obviously tailored to your current size. For now, you can put one on over your cat suit, which will enable you to get down to your stateroom incognito. You are being accommodated in twenty-one, deck two, starboard bow. If you need anything, just…"…

But Shego wasn't listening to a word Lo Pin was saying. She had been transported back in time. Back to a time before her life was completely fucked up and filled with anger and frustration and misery, back to a time when… well, when it was just as fucked up to be honest, but she was as happy as she had ever been…

oOo

The Go family was a rigid and institutionally misogynistic patriarchy. Four generations of the sons of the Go dynasty had built Go city from a one shack stagecoach halt into the thriving metropolis it was at the end of the 1980's, and had built Go and Sons General Store & Livery Stable into the global corporate industrial colossus that the Go Corporation now was. For generations the daughters of the Go dynasty had been married off like surplus cattle, to secure a business deal or just to get them out from under the feet of the menfolk. It had ever been that way, and Hubert Go, current Patriarch, had no intention of changing anything. If she had a contrary view on the matter, his good lady wife Lucinda was powerless to influence matters. In the fullness of time, the eldest, Henry, after spending time at a succession of the very expensive private boarding schools that educated the children of the elite of the elite and specialised in inculcating them to believe that by birth-right alone, their shit didn't stink and that they were 'children of destiny', would go to an Ivy League university that would have coincidentally recently benefited from a new 'Go Library' or similar, academic achievement or lack thereof notwithstanding, where he would hopefully learn something other than how infallible he was. After that, as the eldest child, he would begin an apprenticeship at the corporation, learning the business and then taking gradually more and more responsibility. His younger brothers would follow the same trajectory, ready to step into his shoes were he to fail to make the grade for the top job. If Hubert concluded that Henry wasn't up to it, the script said that he would find himself with some grandly titled and highly paid do-nothing sinecure where he could not do any damage, and Michael would get the next shot at being groomed for the brass ring. William and Walter were still babes in arms, but in due course they too would get their shot. Even if Henry did make the grade and inherit the top job, Michael, William and Walter could expect to be heading major divisions of the corporation if they were up to it. So far, at least one of the Go sons had always had what it took, in intellect, drive and ambition, to make the Go Corporation his; the Go gene. It was the way the Go Dynasty worked. And Sheila? Little Sheila didn't count. Sheila wouldn't go to a top private boarding school, it would be a waste of money and only give her ideas above her station. Sheila would have a governess who would manage her education, hire her tutors and ensure that she would be taught all she needed to know to be eligible to be married off at some convenient point, preferably sooner rather than later, with a realistic expectation of her station and purpose in life, which was to make babies for somebody else and make appropriate chit-chat at the dinner parties she hosted for them in between the making of the babies and doing needlepoint.

In fact, the only Go publicly not on board with this life-plan for Sheila was little Sheila herself. She was just about to turn seven years old and had seen off two governesses already, by the most Machiavellian and horrible means. One, a lady of Germanic origins with a glittering track record as a governess to the fabulously wealthy, and who had perpetually attempted to turn natural tomboy Sheila into a 'pretty young lady' had literally run away screaming having had a nervous breakdown after a year of unremitting verbal torture and psychological warfare at the hands of the proto-brat in question. The second had lasted only 9 months, after developing an addiction to the prescription anti-depressants that she had started taking to ward off the effects of Sheila's insidious campaign of mental torture. And then the little minx reported her to her father's head of corporate security as a junkie, and she was gone with in the day.

The problem, or a good part of it, was that Hubert didn't believe in hands-on parenting. Or daughters. So hands on parenting of daughters was doubly against his principles, and if it was against his principles then by definition it was against his wife's principles as well - that being how their relationship functioned, as far as it did. And at 6 years old going on 7, Sheila wanted to be a daddy's girl, to earn if not her father's love, at least her father's attention. She had sent one governess mad, any number of tutors had declined to try to teach Sheila anything further despite the excellent remuneration and her obvious intellect because she was such a calculated and despicable horror, and now she had ruined the career and health of a second. And still Hubert wasn't going to go anywhere near his daughter, in fact he would have done anything to avoid it, even if he hadn't been busy running a corporate empire. But what he did do was up the salary he was offering for the role of governess massively, on the principle that there is no problem that cannot be solved by the application of sufficiently large amounts of money. He didn't attract either Mary Poppins, or Nanny McPhee - they obviously both had more sense. But the huge rewards did attract an application from one Amelia McTavish, con-artiste par-excellence. She came with beautiful letters of recommendation and exquisite references, all carefully forged by her own fair hand, and she also came guaranteeing that Hubert would see results from her innovative and novel approach to child rearing. Although in fact she was interviewed for the job of Governess by the HR department at the Go Corporation, because Hubert was busy on a conference call at the time, and it was made clear to her that the two results he most wanted to see were no hassle now or in the future, and an easily marriageable woman in about eleven years time.

The fact that the Go Corporation, and Hubert, knew her as Amelia Bo-Tournet, governess to the stars didn't become a problem for Ms McTavish for about two and a half months. That was when little Sheila, curious to understand why her new governess seemed not to be interested in giving her a hard time or sending her to any tutors, but did seem to be spending a lot of time typing up invoices for expensive private tuition to send to the Go Corporation accounts department , decided to search her apartment to try and get some answers for herself.

Amelia McTavish was going to hoover as much money out of the virtually bottomless Go family pocket as she could while the going was good, and then get the hell out of dodge, one step ahead of the posse, relying on the fact that the hyper rich very often have egos that prevent them publically admitting to the fact that they have been had over by a confidence trickster, preferring to take the losses on the chin rather than submit to the public humiliation and widespread sniggering that pursuing her or involving the police would entail.

And then the just-turned-7 year old girl that she had hardly exchanged two words with since she was appointed as her governess, cleared her throat from across the Children's Day Room in the East Wing at Go Hall and said loudly to her "And who is Amelia McTavish? Or Anna Santiago?".

"I've no idea, who are they?", lied Amelia. In later years, she laughed with Sheila about how screwed she had felt at that moment when she was outed by a 7 year old girl.

"I don't know either", said little Sheila. "But they look just like you, and their passports were hidden in the lining of your suitcase. I wonder if my father knows them? Perhaps I should ask", the little girl asked sweetly.

Amelia didn't say a word, but she ran back to her room, returning very shortly afterwards with her suitcase and an empty holdall, and started grabbing valuables, antiques and ornaments from shelves, the walls, cupboards and stuffing them into the empty canvas bag, saying "You'd better give me those passports, kid, or I'll have to come and take them off you…", over her shoulder as she worked.

"You and whose army?", said Sheila, sweetly. Amelia later remembered thinking 'Jeez… this kid has spirit' as she desperately tried to grab everything she could before doing a runner. Apparently she hadn't been looking forward to taking her passport back from a feisty 7 year old kid, let alone locking her in the broom closet while she made her escape.

None of which was an issue in practice, because just as Amelia was struggling to zip up the bulging holdall full of ill-gotten booty, little Sheila cleared her throat loudly again. When Amelia looked round, she was shocked to see a smirking Sheila standing on a chair pushed up to the wall, with her finger on the wall-mounted panic button. One press of that button would put the mansion into lock-down and bring armed security running. Jail would follow with a horrible inevitability. But Sheila hadn't pressed it. Yet.

There was a stand-off. But Sheila obviously had Amelia's undivided attention. And still she looked like butter wouldn't melt in her pretty little mouth as she asked "How much do you think you will get for all that stuff if I let you go?", pointing at the holdall.

After thinking for a few moments, obviously weighing up the difficulty of fencing some of the more identifiable art and antique items, and the naturally limited range of buyers interested in obviously hot identifiable artwork which tended to depress values further. "Maybe $5,000… or $10,000 if I'm really lucky", she eventually said, beads of sweat forming on her forehead.

"And how much is my father paying you to be my Governess?", asked Sheila.

"$150,000 a year plus expenses", said Amelia, still sweating. And of course, that was back when $150,000 really was a hell of a lot of money. Apparently the price of being reassured that you'd never have to actually talk to your own daughter was quite high.

"Then it does seem a bit of a pity for you to leave now, doesn't it!", said Sheila with a cheerful grin.

An expression that telegraphed a mixture of relief, real admiration and wonder came over the woman's face. "Keep talking, kid…", said Amelia, with the beginnings of a smile.

"I think you will make an absolutely wonderful Governess. If you are interested…", said Sheila, with that same damned dimpled sweetness that Amelia later said had very obviously concealed a core of steel, even when Sheila was just seven years old.

"And… your cut of the action would be?", asked Amelia, sounding a little confused.

"Oh… what on earth would I do with money, silly?", said Sheila holding her free arm out and waving it around to indicate all of the opulence of Go Hall, which was the very embodiment of a gilded cage. "No, I want to learn things. I want to do things. I want to have fun!".

Amelia never said a word. She just unzipped the holdall and started putting the things she had stuffed into it back where she had taken them from. After a couple of minutes, Sheila climbed down off her chair, and began to help her put the would-be booty away.

Sheila had a new plan, not yet full formed, beyond having fun, getting some intellectual stimulation and not having to take piano lessons any more. Instead of gaining her father's attention by being a little horror, which she had begun to realise would only end with her father shipping her off to some austere convent school a thousand miles away as a preferable alternative to being a parent to her, she would secretly become utterly brilliant and indispensable to Go Corporation, and then he would be forced to take her seriously and acknowledge her when she was older.

It began as a relationship of mutual convenience. Amelia converted her 'smash and grab' con into a long con, building a proper legend for Amelia Bo-Tournet that would withstand an in-depth investigation in future, and then she began working with others in her circle of former partners in crime to build front operations that would enable her to funnel Go money through educational institutions that Hubert Go, the Go Corporation finance department, or indeed the auditors, would consider suitable suppliers of tutoring to young Sheila. It pretty soon became clear that Sheila definitely had 'the Go gene'. It was only later that it became clear that she was the oldest of her siblings to have it. She was intelligent, motivated to the point of being driven to learn, voracious in her thirst for knowledge and a quick study. She was, in fact, very hard to keep up with. Amelia found herself using her front operations more to conceal the breadth and extent of Sheila's quest for an education and skills than for milking the Go Corporation. Although she was always careful not to ever end up subsidising her partner in crime, and to take at least some profit on everything she funnelled through her network of front companies. She was also firm with Sheila, but only when she needed to be. When Amelia insisted that she take some piano lessons, Sheila rebelled and pointed out that one point of the whole deal with Amelia was that she wouldn't have to do that any more. Amelia replied that she needed to learn two pieces of piano music off by heart _and_ how to play scales so that she wouldn't have to learn any more, but she would always have a party piece she could use in an emergency if her father ever asked to hear her play. And then she packed a pouting Sheila off to a piano teacher.

To this day, Shego thought she could probably sit at a piano, and belt out a pretty competent rendition of the flashy part Mozart's piano concerto no 23, and some bit of Beethoven she couldn't even remember the name of now. Both learned entirely by rote 'just in case'. Her father never heard her play them, of course, rendering the whole exercise moot.

Sheila was no genius or savant, but the combination of being both clever and highly motivated compensated for this deficiency in large measure. Initially her largest childish indulgences were that she wanted to learn to fly (both for fun and because she had it in her head that if she were a pilot she could fly the Go corporate Jet and ferry her father round the globe on business), and she wanted to learn martial arts, so that perhaps she could prove herself as her father's bodyguard. It was Amelia who picked Wing Chun for her to learn, because - she later explained - she didn't want 7 year old Sheila getting injuries in a more kinetic style that she would find it impossible to explain to her employer/mark. Of course, Sheila turned out to be a naturally gifted pilot, and took to classic ip man Wing Chun like a duck to water. Amelia erected a Wing Chun dummy for her in the little tool shack behind the air conditioners on the roof of the East Wing of Go Hall, and Sheila used to spend hours up there practicing. As she got older and generally angrier year by year, she would spend hours in that little shack, smashing the crap out of the unyielding hardwood dummy at blistering pace for hours on end, as a form of therapy. It was what enabled her to keep the lid on all her many frustrations for the rest of the time. Sheila had one to one tuition from a Wing Chun instructor to begin with, and Amelia slipped 10% on top and billed Go Corporation for 'Self Defence Classes for Well Bred Young Ladies' or something similar. Eventually the instructor wanted to introduce Sheila to _his_ instructor, and pretty soon she was training learning complex forms with weapons and was becoming an incomparable demon at sticky hands, and at breaking with kicks; Amelia nixed breaking with her hands or contact sparring for fear that she might injure herself and put what was now the greatest, most lucrative con of her career in jeopardy.

Sheila also discovered a facility for languages, and again, partly motivated by the nebulous idea that if she was multi-lingual she could prove her value as an interpreter for her father in global negotiations, she focused on the languages associated with the countries that the Go corporation did business. She eschewed academically rigorous studies of grammatical rules in favour of being able to make herself understood in conversation, and read and write in different languages competently. Learning one or sometimes two languages at a time, she eventually gained a basic competence in seven, not including English, the most challenging to become literate in being those that didn't use Arabic script.

Of course all of her studies had self-generating consequences. Having learned to fly, she quickly realised for herself that she would need to learn more mathematics if she was going to learn to navigate, and she voluntarily embarked enthusiastically on high school level maths tuition. She didn't have a pilots licence, but she did have a log book and had more logged hours in it at 9 years old than a great many private pilots managed in a lifetime, but she wanted more. She unofficially made the high school maths grade, she studied meteorology, she unofficially passed all the exams she would need to pass in order to obtain night and instrument ratings. And then she wanted to fly multi-engine planes, and then jets, and then more and more specific types. By the time she was ten years old going on eleven, keeping up with her was causing Amelia real difficulty. For example, Sheila wanted to add the Boeing 737 to the list of planes in her log book, so Amelia had to find a full motion flight simulator somewhere in the USA, arrange access to it after hours by greasing the right palms, using all her skill as a con artist to conceal who she was doing it for or why, then find a retired instructor pilot and a recently fired simulator operator who would turn up there at 9pm in the evening and work all night in exchange for a well stuffed brown envelope. By morning, little Sheila was signed off as qualified to captain a Boeing 737, or at least she would be if she actually had had a pilots licence, and a very confused retired training captain went home to bed, not sure whether the whole thing was actually a bizarre dream or not. After the event, Amelia had to find a way of charging the cost of all that palm greasing and back handing back to Go Corporation without raising questions; there were only so many 'Ladies Deportment' or 'Advanced Needlepoint' classes that Amelia could put through the books before somebody raised an eyebrow. By now Sheila had more flying hours in more types of aircraft than most professional test pilots, was a highly skilled aerobatic pilot, had learnt to sky-dive, to snow-board and to scuba dive, and Amelia was starting to think that a proper job would be less work than her life of supposedly easy crime.

At the age of 11, it occurred to Sheila that Amelia was a mine of useful skills and knowledge herself. Indeed, all Amelia's skills in skulduggery would be useful for somebody who wished to pursue a career in industrial espionage. Perhaps she could prove her worth to her father by spying on the competitors of the Go corporation?

Amelia was hugely in favour of this new focus of Sheila's, because teaching Sheila the skills that she had acquired over a lifetime of bunko and fraud was more profitable and less like hard work for her. Of course, it didn't last, Sheila had soon soaked up everything Amelia could teach her about forgery and social engineering, about laying false trails and the art of top class flim-flam. Her charge soon wanted to know about forensic science, about the new fields of computer-aided crime and hacking, about the skills of the burglar and the safe cracker, how to pick locks and hot-wire cars, how to use explosives, second story work, electronics and alarm systems; fortunately, Amelia knew a lot of people, experts in all these fields, who she could trust to teach Sheila everything they knew, for the right price, all paid for by the father she was still desperate to impress, despite not being able to share her accomplishments with him just yet. One day… one day…

Over the years, Sheila's relationship with Amelia became much more ambiguous. It started out strictly as a business arrangement, the precocious 7 year old brat and the thirty-five year old Scottish con-woman working together for mutual advantage, with no underlying warmth at all. By the time Sheila was just starting to grow into a young woman, it was all a little _less_ obvious whether they were still merely unlikely business partners, or whether there was a hint of surrogate mother/proxy daughter in their relationship. If there was, it remained mostly unexpressed, the ambiguity surfacing only with the utmost rarity. In fact, the clearest example of ambiguity of them all coincided with the only time that Amelia's rigorous vetting of the criminals she contracted to teach young Sheila what she was desperate to know let her down .

Normally, Amelia picked personable, friendly crooks who at a minimum understood that 'keeping the kid happy' was essential to their getting paid. Some of them were genuinely nice people, others just good at pretending for the sake of a lucrative pay-day, but the effect was the same. The reticence that, say, an expert safe cracker might feel at sharing his hard won skills with a potential competitor was entirely defused by Amelia in advance of Sheila ever meeting the prospective teacher; she used to explain that teaching a spoilt billionaire's daughter how to be an expert safe cracker obviously wasn't going to end up with her cracking safes for a living when she grew up, and in the end most people love to show off for a lot of money if it doesn't hurt them to do it.

Just once, Amelia messed up. Twelve year old Sheila had gone to see 'Sammy the Toe', who was supposed to teach her how to make, and fake, credit cards. 'Sammy the Toe' actually thought he would be a lot better off if he kidnapped the rich heiress and ransomed her back to her family for a six figure sum. As Sammy was advancing on the twelve year old girl cowering in the corner of his locked workshop with a chloroform soaked pad in his hand, though, Sheila kicked another human being in the face for the first time in her life, breaking his jaw, then ran into his office, barricaded the door and tearfully phoned Amelia to ask for her help.

It was twelve minutes later, as 'Sammy the Toe' tried desperately to get into his office and have another go at subduing his potential meal ticket, that the door of the workshop caved in, and half a dozen very large men who Sheila had never seen before, never saw again and who all seemed to share a single eyebrow between them, steamed in through the splintered portal, followed by an extremely angry and upset looking Amelia. Of course Sheila rushed out of Sammy's office and straight into her arms, where she sobbed uncontrollably while Amelia enveloped her tightly in a hug and made reassuring noises into her ear. Somewhere in the background, there were some very unpleasant sounds indeed surrounding 'Sammy the Toe', but Sheila wasn't paying that much attention. When she eventually emerged from Amelia's arms and wiped her red-rimmed eyes, neither 'Sammy the Toe', nor the six very large men, were anywhere to be seen.

Of course the ambiguity arose because Sheila really was the goose that laid Amelia's golden eggs, and if you'd asked her she would have sworn blind that that was why she was so desperate to protect Sheila from the would be kidnapper, and to hug her so tightly when she brought the cavalry to her rescue, but it didn't feel like that to a bawling Shego at the time.

Amelia later told Sheila that 'Sammy the Toe' had been encouraged to leave town forever immediately and never come back, and of course with touching naivety, Sheila believed it without question. With the benefit of 15 years of perspective, Shego was now perfectly resigned to the idea that Sammy had ended that same day wearing a concrete overcoat and laying at the bottom of Go Bay for all eternity.

'Sammy the Toe' aside, these were the happiest years of Sheila Go's life, between the ages of seven and fourteen. If two tonnes of space rock hadn't turned her existence upside down forever, who knows how events would have unfolded? Henry was clearly never going to make it as the next patriarch of the Go dynasty, Michael was more capable and less of an idiot but completely unmotivated and disinterested, and Sheila… well, who knows how it would have panned out. Maybe Sheila would have been able to break the mould and become the first Go matriarch; the only reason she couldn't have made it was the lack of a Y chromosome. But of course she'd never know now. Her parents were dead, Amelia was dead and her life had spiralled off ever further into chaos and insanity, with so many questions left hanging and unanswered, so many issues unresolved, so much unsaid that never would be now. The if-onlys piled up on top of the what-ifs until they were heaped up higher than Go mountain, and… EUGHH!

But… 'The White Ninja'. When she was 9 years old, Sheila was desperate to compete in the martial arts competitions that the other, regular students of her sifu were able to enter. Of course it was impossible. If she won anything, and she was desperate to win, one photograph in the Go City Chronicle and it might all be over. It was Amelia that came to the rescue, with the assistance of her Sifu who campaigned on her behalf with the local martial arts organisations, and 'The White Ninja' was born. Of course, competing anonymously, Sheila couldn't enter competitions in her own age category so she had to enter the Open classes, competing against adults. Not sparring, obviously, but demonstrating her prowess at forms, kata, with weapons and without. By the age of eleven, her photograph was indeed in the Go City Chronicle, a newspaper owned by the Go Corporation, as she won her first competition against all comers. By the time she was 13, the little shack next to the air-conditioners on the roof of Go Hall was full of open class forms and weapon trophies, as The White Ninja put all comers to the sword, quite literally (her Sai Sword demonstrations were the highlight of any competition, drawing spectators from far and wide) at city and even state level, and beside them a cuttings book bulged with local newspaper articles and martial arts magazine clippings. One day, she had dreamed of showing her father what she had accomplished, and fondly imagined him blooming with pride.

Of course it had all been vaporised when that accursed meteorite struck the building. And that had been the end of The White Ninja, like so much of the rest of Sheila Go's life, forever.

Or so she had thought at the time.

oOo

As she stepped out of the white Shinobi-Shozeki, folded it carefully and placed it on the comfortable looking bed in her stateroom alongside three identical outfits, Shego wondered whether Lo Pin had just been lucky when he hit on the formula that would so readily persuade her to stay and enter his tournament, or whether he really was that good at pushing her buttons. This time three days earlier, she had been two continents away, licking her wounds and thinking only about inflicting a horrible and unforgettable revenge upon the CIA. Now she was aboard a Chinese Junk heading towards a martial arts tournament on a rock in the middle of nowhere organised by somebody she had never previously even heard of, let alone met. If all this was part of some Machiavellian plan to get her here despite herself, Lo Pin was clearly a very dangerous individual indeed, and she almost wanted to be here all the more to find out what diabolical plot he was hatching. Otherwise… meh. Lo-Pin's island was as good a place as any to get herself back into top fighting shape and ready to rumble.

She pulled open her holdall, and had a brief rummage, before pulling out a boult of asbestos cloth, which she unrolled across the coffee table at the foot of the bed, to reveal several pieces of titanium scrap, and a half fabricated Sai Sword. Then she dived back into the holdall and pulled out a clean sports bra, socks and a fresh pair of panties, all green and black naturally. Then, finally, she unzipped the stained green and black cat suit, wrinkling her nose as she peeled it off and the air hummed gently with the stink of a body after 5 days and nights of exertion and desert heat, untroubled by soap, water or deodorant. 'Phew…', she thought. She temporarily discarded her somewhat crunchy underwear onto the floor, and advanced towards the en-suite facilities with relish, flinging open the door enthusiastically. Then she frowned. 'Dammit,' she thought as she realised that the shower head was fixed very firmly to the cabin wall in the shower cubicle. 'Oh well, at least I can get clean, anyway…'.

oOo

As Shego allowed the hot water to wash the stink and sweat of 5 days and 10,000 hard miles down the drain in the shower cubicle of her stateroom on Lo Pin's junk, Ron Stoppable was glancing anxiously at the clock over the concourse in the Arrival's Hall at Chek Lap Kok International, as he fumbled with the key of Left Luggage Locker 126. After a brief fight, he was victorious and the door swung open to reveal a wooden trunk, a large manila envelope and a small empty messenger bag. He quickly rifled through his pockets, transferring every vestige of Ron Stoppable, including his passport and the return half of his ticket, into the messenger bag. He popped the The Cuff of Sosumiha into the unlocked trunk, closing the lid and then turning the large key; it locked with a loud clunk, and he quickly pocketed the key. Then he pulled out the envelope and rifled inside. There was a bundle of bank notes, he was expecting there to be three hundred Hong Kong dollars although he didn't take the time to count the bills before he pocketed those, and then he pulled out a little electronic gizmo with a couple of tiny shoulder straps. "Yours, little buddy!", he said quietly, and slipped the device into the thigh pocket of his cargo pants, where he felt it taken from his hand and heard a muffled "Aha! OK". Then he shook the now empty envelope out to make sure there was nothing else lurking in the bottom, pulled the heavy trunk out of the locker and put it on the floor, dropped the messenger bag inside the now empty locker, which he slammed and locked, popped the key inside the empty envelope which had a Yamanouchi crest on the front, and sealed it quickly, then posted it into the adjacent post box. If all went to plan, it would be extracted from the local postal sorting centre by a Yamanouchi alumnus and used to recover his Ron Stoppable documentation from the locker. It would then all be returned to him before he headed home. Assuming he didn't end up incarcerated in Lo Pin's dungeons or worse in the meantime. Then he shouldered the heavy trunk and made his way as fast as he could walk towards the exit that advertised the presence of a taxi-rank. He still had a little time in hand, but a lot less than he should have, thanks to that damned earthquake. He hoped Hirotaka-san hadn't got himself caught or worse!

As soon as he reached the exit he slowed to a halt and his jaw dropped. "Uh oh…", he said under his breath, as he gazed upon the long, snaking taxi queue and at the head of it, an empty taxi rank. "Not… good." He got the distinct impression, looking at the queue, that he'd still be standing there when the Reception Centre closed, and probably for an hour after that. He made a snap decision, re-hefted the trunk on his shoulder, turned around and all but ran towards the signposted Airport Express Rail Terminal. He had no idea where he was going, beyond the place name on the invitation, he had been told to take a taxi from the airport, but he figured that if he took a train ride and hopped off at the first station stop, he would be able to flag down a taxi from there much more easily. Well, he hoped so, anyway.

'Fingers crossed…', thought Ron as the steps down to the MTR railway station hove into view... , '...and anyway, what else could possibly go wrong?'


	23. Big Trouble in Yang Tsung Quarry No 3

23. Big Trouble in Yang Tsung Quarry No 3

The burn phone in his pocket vibrated once, briefly. Cho Fat Kai Tung, "Sammy Cho" as he was more commonly known, quickly pulled it out of his pocket, flipped it open and looked at the incoming text message. Not the words, which he assumed would be some innocuous irrelevant message like 'Please call me this at home this evening, darling' or 'Can you bring some noodles home with you tonight?', but the sender, which should be one of three more burn phones, the numbers of which he had memorised. The fact that one untraceable phone on the Kowloon side had texted another untraceable phone on Tsing Yi island to ask whether the recipient wanted the sender to record the Adrenna Lynne re-run on Channel Twenty-Nine tonight was of no obvious import. But as Sammy was texting back a pre-prepared "Yes please!", he knew that the sender was sitting on a beer crate on the roof of 'The Craphole', as home was endearingly called by residents and non-residents alike, with a pair of powerful binoculars, and that the text meant that the latest MTR Airport Express train had just entered the tunnel portal on Lantau Island en-route to Tsing Yi station. He snapped the cheap flip-phone shut and dropped it back into his pocket, threw the half finished cigarette down onto the asphalt and ground it into a smear of tobacco leaves and ash with the ball of his foot, then donned his sunglasses, opened the door of the Mercedes diesel 'taxi' and dropped quickly into the driving seat.

He pushed his sunglasses back onto the bridge of his nose, took another glance at the A4 sheet of paper which was currently double-sided taped to the front of the taxi-meter, and tried to commit the grainy image of one Shin Po Shek, whose face he was looking to pick out of a crowd, to memory. Then he started the engine and nosed the car out of the lay-by on Sai Tso Wan road. He had timed this run enough times to be reasonably sure that if he drove so as not to attract any attention, he'd be driving past the side entrance to the station at about or slightly after the time that a harassed passenger on the train that he knew even now was rattling through the long tunnel under the Ma Wan Channel might emerge from the concourse and try to hail a cab. The only major imponderable, once they knew that Shin Po Shek's flight had landed, was 'which train will the target catch'. They usually ran the same sequence three times, with three different pairs of burn phones, for each of the three trains they thought it most likely that their target would be aboard. Run one had been a bust, so Sammy had driven straight past the station and then followed the North Coast Road back round to his stand-by position, and waited for run two. He didn't need to tell Billy, his spotter, that he had come up empty - he could be clearly seen parked up through binoculars from the roof of The Craphole.

'Second time lucky!', he thought.

Past experience told him that he had about a three in ten chance of it all working out today. If it didn't come off, they had three more pre-arranged 'chance' opportunities to pick the guy up over the next two days, with the cash on him. Overall, that gave them a six or seven in ten shot at hitting pay-dirt, and that made all the effort worthwhile. They could have gone for more direct approaches of course, but that would have been self-defeating, because from the circumstances of the robberies it would have been very obvious to their targets, after the fact, that they had been set up by somebody who knew they were coming to Hong Kong and would have cash with them, which would have meant that the police would also soon know. This less assured approach meant that whereas they missed a few juicy pigeons, they had so far remained very much below the radar, with both the mainland police and the Hong Kong force still blissfully unaware that there was an on-going and lucrative criminal conspiracy afoot. If they were careful, reasoned Sammy, they could run this profitable side-line pretty much forever!

It would work today, if it did, because the chances of a real taxi passing the side entrance of the Tsing Yi station plying for hire were realistically, next to nil. No cabbie would want to take the long drive back from or out to the airport without a fare on board, not when they could keep the meter ticking over ferrying people around Hong Kong island or Kowloon. Even the Lantau cabbies who started each day on the airport rank would not return to the airport empty if they could help it. The local cab drivers based on Tsing Yi all used the rank on the concourse at the front of the station, and it was considered poor cab-driver etiquette, a form of queue jumping, to drive round the station touting for trade instead of lining up on the rank and taking their turn.

No, anybody flagging down a passing cab within the hour on the drag past Tsing Yi Station would have to be pretty lucky. Not that a naive nouveau rich business man from one of the newly industrialised economic development zones inside China would ever know that, on their first trip to the 'Special Administrative Zone'. Especially if they had been warned by the high-powered business contact they were meeting in Hong Kong that the airport rank never had enough cabs, and if it had been suggested to them that they should hop onto the Airport Express and hop off at Tsing-Yi and flag down one of the "many passing taxis" to avoid a long wait…

Sammy flipped the jury-rigged switch under the dashboard to switch on the taxi-light as he turned into the service road past the side entrance to Tsing-Yi station, and cruised towards the point opposite the station exit where a harassed passenger might try to hail a cab, eyes on the swivel. As he approached he could see a slightly portly middle aged man, with a wheeled suitcase at his feet waving hopefully. 'Could be…', thought Sammy. 'Looks like it is…'. He stole a quick glance at the A4 sheet as he closed on the target; 'Yes!'. He snatched the A4 sheet down with his left hand and screwed it into a small ball, throwing it under his seat as he cruised smoothly towards the relieved looking man. Winding down his window as he drew alongside, he asked "Taxi?".

"Yes please. Kowloon, the Golden Dragon Hotel…" said Shin Po Shek, a ruddy faced and very well fed looking middle aged man in an ill-fitting suit.

"No problem, Sir!", said Sammy Cho, every inch the dutiful taxi driver as he slid the transmission selector into 'Park' and hopped out of the cab with the keys in his hand. He made his way to the rear of the car and opened the boot, but then, as he turned back to pick up the suitcase he heard a mobile phone ring. Shin Po Shek had his suitcase in his hand, frustrating Sammy's intent which was to pick it up and dump it into the boot, but worse than that he was now talking on the phone.

Sammy stood dutifully by with his hand out, hoping that his impending victim would hand him the case so he could stash it in the boot, but the man was apparently engrossed with some crisis back at his factory.

"Well shut it down!", he was saying, turning away from Sammy with the suitcase still in his hand. Sammy made to reach for the case, but the man took a step forward, speaking animatedly into the phone; "Put Lu on. Put him on now!... I don't care! Put him on!".

"Sir…", said Sammy, plaintively. He had nothing in his script for this. If he could get the guy into his cab, he could get the hell out of here, and then he'd have to hope that the guy finished his call before they got onto Kowloon side, otherwise he'd have to drop him at his hotel and call this target a bust; they only had the Mercedes ready and the guy would certainly make him if he picked him up a second time and _then_ bopped him on the head and dumped him in a ditch in his underwear. But if he couldn't get him in the cab in the first place then he was going to have to drive away and leave him. The guy had barely looked at his face, nor had he been inside the externally generic looking Mercedes 'taxi' and he was wearing shades so if he called it off now, he'd still be good tomorrow if he slicked his hair back, had a clean shave and stuck on a false moustache for the second pass at the man's hotel in the morning.

Reluctantly he turned back to the taxi, just in time to see a blonde western kid hefting an antique wooden trunk into the boot of the car! Sammy was aghast as the smiling freckle-faced youth said "Fung-Mat Road Waterside, please!" in English, with an American accent.

"I'm sorry Sir, this cab is taken!", Sammy replied in English, slightly desperately. The blonde kid looked crestfallen and Sammy really thought he was about to turn back to the boot to retrieve his luggage when he heard a voice behind him. "Let him take it, I'm sorry, I must handle this now. I'll hail another cab…", said the businessman. From the look of the gawky American teenager, who was looking with no comprehension at the fat businessman, he hadn't understood a word that he had just said. Then Mr Shin added "OK… OK.." in badly accented English, forcing Sammy to imagine the hand gestures the perspiring factory boss was making to wave the kid towards the cab. The kid smiled and said "Thank you, Sir! Thank you very much!", throwing his voice loudly enough that he was obviously speaking to Shin Po Shek. Quickly, desperately, Sammy interjected in Cantonese; "No it's OK Sir, you were first, I can wait!", not wanting to look around and give the man another look at his face in case he was going to have to drive off and try again tomorrow. Which he really wasn't going to do with this blonde kid aboard the Mercedes, whatever happened.

"No, no, I must handle this call now. Take the kid… hello? Lu? Shut the line down. Shut it down now, and clean the nozzles…. I don't care. Shut it all down, strip it, and clean the nozzles. Do it now…", and as he spoke, Shin Po Shek's voice receded into the background. He was obviously walking away, and Sammy risked sneaking a quick look; Shin Po Shek was walking back towards the station concourse, suitcase in hand.

'Damn… so near and yet so far!', thought Sammy. 'Still, tomorrow is a new day…'. "I'm sorry, kid, I can't take you. You'll have to take your luggage out of the boot", he said in Mandarin. The kid was still smiling and looking expectant, and Sammy realised firstly that he should have spoken in English, and secondly that the blonde American youth didn't speak a word of Chinese. He tried again in English, "I'm sorry kid, I can't take you. You'll have to take your luggage out of the boot."

The gawky teenager looked crestfallen again, and pulled a decent sized wad of cash out of his pocket, saying "I can afford the fare, see? And I'll give you a really good tip. I'm running late, it's my first time in Hong Kong and I absolutely need to get to Fung-Mat Road on the dockside as soon as possible. Please?".

Out of the corner of his eye, Sammy saw the blue of a Hong Kong police uniform about 200 yards up the road, and suddenly arguing with a stupid _Gweilo_ teenager became the least important thing in the world. Dumping his trunk out on the street and driving off without him was also no longer an option - it would attract attention that would make using a fake cab again tomorrow impossible; there were CCTV cameras here, and any kind of scene might have somebody reviewing the tape and realising that the cab wasn't a real cab at all. If a fake cabbie turned over Shin Po Shek tomorrow then connections could be made and the whole scheme could unravel.

Quickly, Sammy shut the boot, opened the back door of the cab and said "OK, no problem!", then hopped into the driving seat and pulled away. He flicked on the jury rigged old meter and flicked off the taxi sign as he went, with the blonde American youth sitting in the back seat behind him.

'Shit. Now what?', he thought. He could take the kid where he wanted to go, except that he'd need to look at a map, he had no idea where whatever that street the guy had asked for was anyway. Plus this kid had just potentially cost him $6,000, his share of the pickings from the cash that he knew Shin Po Shek was packing.

It was supposed to be a sweet scam, a lucrative side-line on top of the chop shop and the fake Rolexes. So far it always had been sweet, as well. Hong Kong was the gateway to world markets and the epicentre of electronic trading with the world for small Chinese domestic manufacturers, and there were a number of companies in Hong Kong that specialised in providing direct e-commerce access for western consumers to emerging domestic Chinese industrial enterprises, especially those in the newer and remoter parts of the rapidly growing and developing heart of China. One of those companies was run by a former resident of 'The Craphole', and it did indeed provide global internet shoppers with access to goods from small factories deep in mainland China. But the boss also had an neat side-line in ripping off his potential clients. He knew that transferring large sums in Yuan into Hong Kong in Hong Kong dollars was beyond the ability of many provincial banks in the newly developed industrial regions of the Chinese hinterland, and that it was a fiendishly expensive way of moving money even if they could. So when he demanded a face to face meeting at his office in Hong Kong with prospective clients, along with a bond in Hong Kong dollars to cover his company against supply and quality problems, he was almost guaranteeing that the nouveau entrepreneurs, the naive small businessmen who beat a path to his door to gain access to the global e-commerce market from outside the Great Firewall of China, would bring the funds with them in cash, probably black market cash at that. Of course this was never suggested, and if and when it was successfully delivered the bond cash was placed into escrow with a local law firm and handled scrupulously; the legal shitstorm that would engulf the company and its boss if it wasn't would bury it and him alike, but after an unfortunate businessman had been relieved of all of his worldly goods, and a large sum of undelivered cash by Sammy and his comrades from The Craphole, the guy who ran the internet marketing company could express shock that the hapless victim had been carrying all those tens of thousands of dollars about his person, and warn him to use a bank to bank transfer next time. If the booty had been, as it often was, illegally exchanged black market cash, the victim often wouldn't even mention the theft to the authorities back in China, which is where he would be urged to report the robbery by the man who, unbeknownst to the victim, had actually perpetrated it.

Of course, every successfully executed robbery that _was_ reported was one more thing that would probably be hung round all their necks if the scheme ever went badly south, so every success raised the stakes for the next job. But the current situation was a definite first for him. He decided he needed to consult the brains trust back at The Craphole.

He fished the burn phone he had so recently been texted via out of his pocket as he drove towards the Tsing Tsuen bridge, and used his thumb to select the received text message and hit 'Dial' to call its counterpart, as he did so glancing in the rear view mirror. The blonde American kid was sitting back in his seat, eyes closed, seemingly a million miles away, completely oblivious to anything going on around him.

"Hello…", said a cautious voice through the handset. His co-conspirator, and also the chief operational planner of the so far successful robbery scheme, knew that if he actually called him, it meant that something had gone wrong, and something that Sammy couldn't cope with on his own at that. So far, in eighteen months, it hadn't ever happened; Sammy was well drilled and quite capable of playing any of the scenarios they had prepared for, so Billy Chin would have every reason to be concerned when one of the three phones at his feet rang. Not that either of them would use the other's name on the phone. "I've got a problem. I met the correct package, but there was a problem at the pickup and I had to leave with the wrong package!", said Sammy, piloting the Mercedes with one hand and holding the phone in the other.

"The… wrong package?", said the voice in his ear, uncertainly.

"Yes. The wrong package. I think I should deliver it to where it needs to go to get rid of it. But I need directions…", said Sammy.

There was a pause and then the voice on the phone said "Did you meet the original package?".

"Yes, yes, but I think it is OK. I should be able to try again tomorrow. I didn't handle the correct package for more than a few seconds.", said Sammy, reassuringly.

"But you did handle the correct package?", asked the voice in his ear again.

"Yes, yes, but…", said Sammy.

The voice in his ear interrupted him, "No, no, forget it. We will cancel this delivery. It's far too risky now! Can you get rid of the other package easily?".

Sammy swore under his breath. He was relying on that $6,000; his creditors had a late payment policy that hurt. A lot. And he needed a stake if he was to try to gamble his way out from under his current predicament; the Mah-jongg tables were where his trouble stemmed from, and they would surely be his salvation, he simply couldn't keep losing forever. Although he had been telling himself that for years. He knew that his kneecaps were on the line next, and he really wasn't looking forward to trying to talk his way out of losing them. He would have been willing to risk carrying on, but he tended to defer to Billy, who unlike Sammy or almost any other denizen of The Craphole had miraculously managed to make it to the ripe old age of 29 without obtaining a criminal record and was therefore demonstrably worth listening to, and if Billy was calling it off then off is certainly what it now was.

"No… I don't think so. Not unless I drop him… it where it is addressed to. ", said an unhappy sounding Sammy.

"Where is the package addressed to?", asked the voice in his ear.

"I think it was… err… Fung-Mat Road? Where is that?", he asked.

"Hong Kong Island. South End of the Western Harbour Crossing, down by the harbour. But wait a moment. Is he listening to you now?", said Sammy's disembodied voice, momentarily dropping the package motif.

"Yes, but he doesn't understand a word I'm saying. He's a westerner. American. A teenager. First time in Hong Kong, he said. Anyway he's paying no attention. He might even be asleep!", said Sammy.

"OK, well, perhaps we can use this for a bit of extra cover. Can you deliver the package you have got to the original address? ", asked Billy. Sammy could see the way Billy's mind was working; this scrawny American kid wasn't worth the effort, although Billy wouldn't ever have to know about that roll of cash the kid had flashed at the station and that would at least give him a table stake for tonight's game in the back room at Café Wu and a chance to win safety for his kneecaps for another month before next weekend. But if an American tourist got ripped off by a rogue cab driver it would help to further support the narrative that these were random robberies and not targeted attacks on business associates of one particular local company. Then again, as Sammy looked in the rear view mirror and appraised his passenger, he wasn't entirely confident. The technique he had successfully used on his five previous victims, all unsuspecting rotund middle-aged men, was to pull up in a different pre-selected spot on a back road in the country park on the Kowloon side of Hong Kong , tell his passenger that he had a puncture, step out and run around to open the door for them and then cosh them on the back of the neck as they climbed out of the back seat. All five had gone down like a sack of potatoes at the first or in one case second whack, and Sammy had quickly dragged them off the road, stripped them down to their underwear and then plasticuffed and gagged them; all four had still been out for the count when Sammy had driven away back to The Craphole. The idea was that by the time the hapless victim managed to attract somebody's attention , let alone report their predicament to the authorities if they chose to do so, the 'taxi' had already returned to the chop shop that created it and been completely disappeared, either into a pile of untraceable parts in a different colour, or into a re-sprayed ringer, on the way to be sold on a used car lot elsewhere in Hong Kong. The gawky blonde kid didn't exactly look like he'd give Sammy any great trouble, but on the other hand he did look young and fit, and if he didn't go down when Sammy hit him, Sammy doubted that he'd be able to catch him again in a foot race. Partly because Sammy hadn't run anywhere for ten years, partly because he smoked 40 unfiltered cigarettes a day, and partly because he was currently wearing snakeskin cowboy boots and the kid was wearing some kind of black footwear with rubber cleats that looked like it might be well suited to running. If the American youth did get away, Sammy might find that the police were looking for the taxi before he even got it back to The Craphole. And he would be in the open driving down the coast road about 2 minutes flying time away from that police helicopter that seemed to spend all day buzzing about the sky over Hong Kong island.

"I'm... not sure... ", said Sammy.

"Oh... Hard Man?", asked Billy. "Maybe I can gather the troops and come and meet you somewhere if you can keep driving around for a while?".

Sammy glanced in the mirror again. The kid was still sitting back, eyes closed, a seraphic smile on his face. He certainly didn't look like a hard man. In fact, based on his clothes, he looked like a geek. But Sammy also knew he was a geek in a hurry, and that if time dragged on he'd start taking an interest in where they were and where they were going. If he twigged that something funny was going on before he met Billy and whoever he had rounded up to help out... well, he was sitting behind Billy and he had his hands full driving the cab, so driving round in circles for a long time while Billy got the cavalry together really didn't appeal too much.

"No... Not a hard man. But could be slippery. And fast on his feet. I'm sure I can take him if I can catch him, but... Actually, he really is asleep at the moment I think...", proffered Sammy.

"Asleep?", asked Billy, surprise tingeing his voice.

"Well, his eyes are closed. I won't know if he's asleep unless I stop. I know he's in a hurry, though, so I don't want to drive him around for too long in case he gets restless. Maybe I should just take him to Fung-Mat Road? The junction is coming up…", said Sammy.

"No… no… wait a minute… ", said Billy.

"No time…", interjected Sammy as the 300 metre marker board for the turning sailed past.

"Right.. right, bring him here!", said Billy, assertively.

"What?", asked Sammy, incredulously.

"Yes, just do it. Bring him here! I'll make the arrangements. Don't wake him up, just bring him here!", said Billy, assertively.

"This is insanity!", muttered Sammy, changing lanes smoothly and heading North instead of South. Had Billy taken leave of his senses, Sammy wondered? Why take the risk of bringing him back to The Craphole? What on earth good could come of this? Billy was always the guy with the good ideas, but… and another thing; bang would go Sammy's chance of pocketing the wad of cash in the kid's pocket all for himself. Still, at least if they all ended up in jail when the kid led the police back to The Craphole, he'd still have his kneecaps next week.

"OK, listen…", said Billy. "If he starts taking an interest in where he is, tell him you had to take a detour to avoid a big jam or something and then take him back to Fung-Mat road. I'm going to get Big Lim to meet you here. The gates will be open, we'll close them behind you . He'll have a lump on his head and a sack over his eyes before he knows which way is up. We can tie him up and dump him wherever we like later. I'm going to set it up now. See you in about ten minutes…".

'Big Lim. Poor kid… hope he doesn't die of fright!', thought Sammy. He could see that this might work after all. And, he'd just realised, if they kept the kid tied up overnight, and changed the plates on the cab, then Billy could drive it tomorrow and they could still go after Shin Po Shek. It was about time that Billy got to do some proper graft while Sammy got to chill out at home. His kneecaps were feeling better already!

oOo

Ron centred himself and focused on his breathing. He'd not really experimented with letting his inner monkey meditate. It had been less than 5 hours since he had peeled off the cuff of Sosumiha in the dinghy service tunnel outside the airport terminal back in Japan and his own inner mystical monkey was still basking full force in the jump-start it had been given by the ancient artifact. But unfortunately for his supernatural simian soulmate, which wanted to float three inches above the back seat of the taxi in something approximating the Lotus position, surrounded by a bubble of existential serenity (not literally, obviously, but figuratively speaking), Ron's mind kept thwarting its ambitions by wandering in entirely random directions.

'Hmm… I really must ask Wade to check that out. It could be a huge scandal! It would certainly explain a lot if Rabbi Katz _was_ taking kick-backs from Big Lotion…'.

oOo

The taxi nosed its way smoothly into the tree-covered hills behind Sham Tseng, with Sammy nervously checking his mirror every ten seconds or so, but the blond haired youth was still seemingly oblivious to all. The risk was greatest now, both in terms of deniability, although Sammy would try and talk his way out of it if he could, and of the youth seeing enough now to be able to lead the police back to The Craphole later.

The last quarter mile seemed to take a lifetime, but eventually there was the familiar nondescript gap in the tree covered rocky slope, and Sammy carefully swung the taxi to the right, trying not to use the brakes or do anything else that might disturb his passenger's apparent slumber. True to Billy's word, the big, rust-streaked corrugated iron gate stood open, with its muscular and dangerous looking attendant, Lo Fung, standing ready to close it behind them. It wasn't until they were nosing through the portal that Sammy checked his mirror for seemingly the millionth time to find the blond-haired American kid looking around him.

"These docks don't look anything like I expected they would…", he said, absent mindedly. Sammy couldn't help himself from grinning but he kept his face front and head down to try to ensure that he kept his amusement to himself.

'The Craphole'. Hong Kong was once littered with abandoned quarries like this, relics of the drive during the 19th and early 20th centuries to extract local stone with which to build the infrastructure of the burgeoning economic powerhouse. The switch to reinforced concrete and steel had brought operations to a shuddering halt all across the colony (as it then was) some time in the 1920's. Most had now vanished in turn under further expansion of Hong Kong's infrastructure and population, many of the remainder had been cleaned up, landscaped and remodelled out of existence, and only one was still in operation producing dressed stone for building fasciae and lining imposing lobbies.

Yang Tsung Quarry No 3, as this one had once been known, closed down in 1924, and its fate would surely have been the same as that of all the others, had it not been for the brutal Japanese occupation of Hong Kong after Pearl Harbour during the Second World War. During that dark time, not only had the people of Hong Kong suffered the terrible privations of the Japanese occupation, but the Japanese occupiers and the industrial facilities they had commandeered had been bombed by the Americans and British in turn for the remaining duration of the war. The Japanese Imperial Army needed barracks on the north side of Victoria Harbour, where local insurgent forces had taken to attacking them and the harbour and then vanishing back into the unforgiving hinterland, and preferably barracks that were protected by concealment and topography from the daily rain of high explosive that the Americans dropped on them. Their answer was to build a horseshoe shaped multi-storey concrete and stone barrack block inside the conveniently shaped former Yang Tsung Quarry No 3.

After the surrender of the Japanese forces in Hong Kong, there were a great many other priorities for the new 'old' British administration, who had not only spent the last two years personally suffering malnutrition and horrific inhuman abuse in Japanese prisoner of war camps, but suddenly found themselves in charge of a traumatised population, that part of it that hadn't fled, and a ruined infrastructure, while London was an exceedingly distant place wrapped up in its own post war traumas. However, Hong Kong being Hong Kong, it bounced back with astonishing rapidity and was once again the economic jewel of the region within a handful of years.

They can have been forgiven for forgetting about an empty Japanese barracks hidden in the hills on the far side of the harbour. But by the time Hong Kong's population had recovered to the point where a coming lack of social housing started to become an issue, and the Hong Kong Housing Authority was formed, something unexpected had happened. Japanese Imperial Barracks Sham Tseng had become a haven for the dispossessed and those on the margins of society. People who did not play well with others, had been traumatised by the war, petty criminals ostracised by their own communities, those ravaged by addictions to opium or by mental illness, had gravitated to the abandoned barracks and turned it into a pre-hippy commune of sorts. And so, at a time when it might so easily have been blown up and replaced by a giant block of Housing Authority flats, it was left alone, filed under 'too much trouble to deal with all the problem people there who are not adding to our problems here right now'.

Over time, 'The Craphole', as people started to call the stained concrete former barracks, grew extra storeys, partitions, catwalks and balconies like topsy, unrestrained by any kind of planning regulation, out of sight and out of mind for Hong Kong's energetic rulers. Whenever the subject of The Craphole had come onto anybody's radar, often times they backed away, scared off by the downsides of fixing something that was… less broken than it ought to have been. One change, though, was that as the social safety net in Hong Kong became more robust, the vulnerable and the needy were gradually cajoled away from the place over many decades; it had started post-war life as a bohemian refuge for the dispossessed and distressed, whereas now… well, it was basically a den of thieves. The sick, the lame, the mentally ill and the honest poor no longer sought refuge in The Craphole. There were no children in the place any more, either - it had been considered by various agencies of the Hong Kong government to be no fit place for the children of even the most unpleasant of people to be born and raised well before the hand-back of Hong Kong from Great Britain to China. Getting pregnant, or getting your partner pregnant, was a guaranteed one-way ticket out of The Craphole and into a Housing Authority apartment, and a welcome one; The Craphole had been spartan and poorly constructed by the standards of 1943 Japanese military architecture, now it was a giant, damp, draughty monument to slum living and the power of improvisation . The majority of the residents of The Craphole today were halfway round a revolving door that would eject them straight back into the prison cell they had come here from, while others were hiding from creditors, or keeping their heads down while they worked hard to feed addictions through petty crime. The Hong Kong Police had long ago worked out that while the law applied equally to everybody, if they applied it with a little less rigour than they did everywhere else to The Craphole, all the scum tended to gravitate to one spot where it could be kept an eye on and locked up again if it got too ambitious. The Craphole was also self-managing to a basic extent; the Police turned, if not a blind, at least a blurred eye towards low level villainy, the chop shop that they knew ran in the courtyard of The Craphole, the minor scams, counterfeit goods, fake auctions, pickpocketing and boosted car radios that were the regular stock in trade of The Craphole's unpleasant but industrious criminal community, but in turn that community knew, partly because it had been explained to them in terms, that if the police did have to kick the gates down and come in mob handed because somebody inside those gates had 'crossed the line', which would have included so much as a sniff of guns, hard drug importation and dealing, violent crime or anything bigger than a few stolen cars, then everybody would be in the dock for every unpaid parking ticket, betting scam, pot plant, fake designer t-shirt and set of loaded dice that could be pinned on them. They could probably just put barbed wire round the perimeter and call it a new jail. Although they might need to upgrade the plumbing before they could get away with doing that.

The residents of The Craphole were of course entirely pragmatic about all this. They would come together en-masse to deal with any external threats, but an internal threat - such as somebody who had very obviously crossed that fuzzy, ill-defined 'line', the rapists and murderers, the people smugglers, would quickly find themselves outside the gate with a boot print on their arse, knowing that they had about ten minutes before somebody in there called the police and tried to claim a reward for turning them in.

As Sammy was nosing the faux taxi inside the gates and drawing to a halt near to a very, very large gentleman with a bald head, who went by the name of 'Big Lim' for very obvious reasons, it suddenly struck Sammy that he was playing around very close to that fuzzy line where he risked bringing down the wrath of the HKP on The Craphole and thus risked being booted out of the place. Bopping unsuspecting mainland Chinese ex-rice-farmers on the head and stealing their cash someplace well away from the Craphole was one thing, all be it not one thing that would sound good read out in court, but it was quite another to bring an American tourist on his gap year, or whatever the blond kid was doing in Hong Kong, back to The Craphole, club him over the head actually on the premises, then effectively abduct him and hold him incommunicado for a few hours before dumping him in a ditch somewhere. This was all Billy's idea, of course - and Billy was, typically, nowhere to be seen when there was anything that might involve getting his hands dirty to be done. But it occurred to Sammy that the quicker they got the kid bound, gagged and tucked up out of sight, the less chance there was of somebody deciding he had crossed that line, rather than just done a quick dance along it.

As the car stopped, Sammy slammed it in to Park and hopped out, but not quickly enough to beat the blond kid out of the back door, rather vindicating his assessment earlier that he might be a bit on the quick and slippery side for him to have taken him on alone.

"So… this doesn't look like the docks… where are we?", asked the blond kid in some confusion, looking at Sammy quizzically as Big Lim loomed over him. Sammy said "Well, it's like this, kid…", and moved around to position himself so that the blond youth had his back fully turned towards the man mountain that was Big Lim, who needed no further invitation, as he pulled his hand out from behind his back to reveal a large black rubber cosh which he brought down violently on the back of the blond kid's neck.

Or rather… he didn't. He brought it down sharply and quickly on the spot where the back of the kids neck had been half a nanosecond before, but somehow he had moved out the way and was now eyeing them both suspiciously. "Hey….", he said, uncertainly. "Is this some kind of shakedown or something? Because if it is, you really, _really_ don't want to do this. ". Amazingly, with Big Lim lumbering towards him frowning and waving the black rubber cosh menacingly, the kid didn't look remotely scared. Instead he said "Listen, seriously, just take me to Fung-Mat road now and I'll forget all this ever happened, OK?

'Clearly, he is too stupid to be scared!', thought Sammy.

The kid started backing away from the car and deeper into the courtyard, apparently pleading with Big Lim not to do anything rash and telling him that he really didn't want to do what he was trying to do. Sammy left him to Big Lim's tender mercies as he went back to the driver's seat and recovered the keys, then trotted back round to the boot and opened it to get the teenager's wooden trunk out of the boot; he needed to make quickly room for his erstwhile passenger in there.

'Who goes anywhere with a wooden trunk these days?' he wondered, as he opened the boot and inspected the intricately detailed mahogany, or was it teak, chest.

It was as he just started to lean forwards and into the boot to grab the trunk and drag it out into the daylight that he got the fright of his life, as the boot-lid slammed shut with a loud crash, passing the tip of his nose by a millimetre and rapping his knuckles as it went from open to closed in a moment. He staggered back in pain and shock, eyes like saucers as he was confronted by the blond youth, crouching like a chimpanzee on the now closed boot of the car, staring him in the face. A millisecond later and he surely would have had his head or neck slammed between the falling boot lid and the lip of the boot, which would have very likely been the end of him.

"Which part of 'You really do not want to do this' are you not understanding here?", demanded the annoyed looking youth. Had he really leapt 20 feet across the courtyard from where he was backing away from Big Lim to land on the boot lid? Nah, impossible… but anyway, looking past the kid, why was Big Lim sitting on the floor in the middle of the courtyard looking like somebody had just really, seriously annoyed him? Big Lim didn't get annoyed. He always worked with a smile on his face, laughing his way through life as he indulged in playful casual thuggery for fun and profit. Sammy had never seen an angry Big Lim before and he was quite glad of that!

Big Lim stood up and lumbered angrily away towards his cubicle, which was just inside the nearest entrance of the adjacent barrack block, but Sammy was barely paying attention to the movement out of the corner of his eye, as he was looking directly into the fearless and determined features of the blond _gweilo_ at very close quarters. This _definitely_ wasn't in the script! Where was Billy now, so full of bright ideas earlier? Probably still up on the roof watching all this.

Sammy shook one of his stinging hands and then reached behind him and pulled his own trusty black rubber cosh from the small of his back, where he had tucked it during the drive across from Tsing Yi, brandishing it in what he hoped was a menacing fashion at the blond kid. Who cocked his head to the left and said "So I guess that means you don't want that big tip, huh?". Then Sammy felt a stinging pain in his forearm, even though he didn't see the unimposing looking American geek move a muscle from his position perched on the boot of the Mercedes, and the cosh toppled to the floor from his nerveless, numb, and entirely paralysed fingers. Had the blond kid punched his forearm so quickly that he didn't even see the movement despite Sammy staring right at him? Again, impossible, he thought. And yet, he seemed to be entirely numb below the point where he had felt the stinging blow and his right wrist and hand flopped uselessly in front of him. He stepped back again, in some confusion.

The blond youth pulled the car keys out of the boot lid, and said "You are going to drive me to Fung-Mat road, and you are going to get me there before half past five. If we go now, then your big friend over there isn't going to get hurt, and I'm not going to miss my boat. Everybody wins. Am I making sense here?".

At that moment, Big Lim stalked out of the doorway of the barrack block, hefting a baseball bat in his hands - although to be honest it did look rather more like a toothpick in his grasp. The blond kid glanced over his shoulder and sighed with what Sammy took to be exasperation. Then he hopped off of the boot lid and strolled round the side of the car, and reached into his pocket, pulling out… something small, pink and wriggling. Opening the rear door of the Mercedes, he placed the… thing… no, creature… on the back seat, then handed it the car keys and said "Lock the doors, Rufus, I'll be back in a moment."; Sammy was sure he heard the little pink thing say "OK…", but again that was impossible. Sammy decided he must be hallucinating or something. Except that a moment later there was a pink blur inside the car and all four door locks went down in sequence. A few moments after that, just as Sammy approached the car again, with the retreat of the blond kid, the ugly wrinkled pink thing suddenly jumped onto the rear parcel shelf and stuck its little tongue out at him, with its tiny pink hands stuck in its ears like moose antlers! Sammy, of course, jumped back again. This was clearly getting weirder and weirder.

He turned his attention to Big Lim, trying to ignore the hideous wrinkly rodent that appeared to be taunting him through the rear window of the Mercedes; Big Lim looked like he had 'crossing the line' very firmly in his mind. Anxiously, Sammy called out 'Don't kill him, Lim!', in Cantonese. He didn't much fancy being an accessory to murder, and killing somebody in the courtyard of The Craphole would bring the coals of hell down on the place if anybody ever found out what had happened. Maybe he could get out from under by testifying against Lim if the worst happened?

Maybe…

Meanwhile, the blond kid was walking directly towards Big Lim, at much the same speed as Big Lim was lumbering towards the kid, which Sammy thought was indicative of a serious death wish on the part of the idiot geek _gweilo_.

As they closed to bat range, Lim suddenly swung the baseball bat (which never had, and likely never would strike anything as mundane as a baseball) violently and powerfully at the blond kid's legs. The kid hopped over the flying bat impassively. An even angrier Big Lim swung the bat back the other way as hard as he could, this time at chest height, and amazingly, rather than ducking under the swinging bat, the kid hopped over it again. Which was, again, impossible of course. But Sammy was definitely paying attention now, and he was sure that it had really happened. Finally, Big Lim cycled the bat round behind his head and started to bring it straight down on top of the blond kid from above; Sammy steeled himself for the geek's head to explode all over the courtyard, but instead, there was a sudden blur as what must have been a fist shot forward and upwards from the blond kid to hit Big Lim square on the chin.

The bat stopped in mid arc, just short of the vertical. Big Lim's eyes glazed over. The bat slowly toppled from Lim's nerveless fingers and landed with a clatter on the worn flagstones directly behind him, and then perhaps half a second later, Big Lim himself toppled slowly forwards like a falling statue; the blond kid stepped aside as he fell, landing full length with a loud smack as he face-planted on the cobbles, arms still outstretched above his head in striking position.

A small cloud of dust billowed around him.

The blond kid stepped over the prone figure and started walking back towards Sammy, looking entirely unmoved by what had just happened. Which is more than could be said for Sammy himself who was rooted to the spot in shock and disbelief. But he wasn't the only spectator in the courtyard, as Sammy remembered when Lo Fung bellowed belligerently at the blond kid, while stalking past Sammy .

To be honest, Sammy kept well away from Lo Fung. As did everybody else. He lived, ate, slept, exercised and trained in and around the little hut that the denizens of The Craphole had built for him just inside the gate that it was his 'job' to guard against any and all unwelcome visitors. A few years before he had been the All Kowloon Open Class Muay Thai champion and tipped for a glittering career in the ring as a professional fighter, before a drugs test had caught his steroid habit and had seen him banned from sanctioned competition. A second failed test after his (brutally victorious) comeback fight had seen that extended to a life ban, and these days the only time he wasn't at his post guarding the gate of the Craphole was when he was fighting, and winning, on the illegal underground cage fighting circuit. The man was both lethal and a walking case of 'roid rage on legs. He made an excellent humanoid guard dog, and an excellent no-rules cage fighter, but as a human being he had absolutely nothing to recommend him. It had been said, only half in unfunny jest, that the only reason he wasn't kept chained to a stake in the courtyard was because nobody was brave enough to try to get a collar on him.

Poor kid. He didn't deserve that. Still, if Lo Fung beat him to death, at least Sammy wouldn't be implicated; the police knew all about Lo Fung and his capacity for extreme violence without provocation.

Lo Fung started to sprint towards the blond youth, who spread his arms wide in an unthreatening gesture, as if to say 'I have no beef with you', but clearly he didn't know Lo Fung, who leapt into a flying kick at the blond youth's chest. Almost predictably, though, he flew over the kid's head when the youth dropped all the way to the floor a millisecond before the psychotic gatekeeper's foot connected. The enraged cage-fighter landed into a fighting stance, and rushed the kid again, and now the kid was still talking to Lo Fung, as he threw a breathtaking selection of rapid-fire kicks, punches and knee strikes at the comparatively wimpish looking teen. In fact, the only thing more amazing than the non-stop whirlwind barrage of powerful potentially bone-shattering assaults being aimed at one unintimidating blond geek by the out of control and rampaging Lo Fung, was the fact that not only were none of them connecting as the blond geek in question hopped, skipped, back-flipped, contorted, dodged and sidestepped the barrage, he was continually if futilely trying to talk the enraged gatekeeper down.

Clearly this couldn't go on forever, it was beyond Sammy's belief that it had lasted for more than two seconds, but when it did end, it certainly wasn't in the way that Sammy had steeled himself for it to do so.

After a while, the blonde kid opened a small gap between himself and his assailant and said "Now listen!", quite loudly. Lo Fung promptly closed the new gap by leaping in for some kind of jumping spinning kick. However, this time, instead of simply dodging the attack, the blond kid helped Lo Fung on his way through the air, and he landed in an untidy heap ten feet away . Lo Fung was evidently feeling no pain, though, as he bellowed in even greater rage and sprung to his feet. Again the blonde kid shouted "Seriously, dude…". As if that was going to slow down Lo Fung who was now sprinting towards the youth, screaming like a maniac. However, what certainly did slow Lo Fung down, as he left the ground running at full speed and spun at an incredible rate with the heel of his left foot outstretched to take the blond kid's head right off his shoulders, was a sudden blur of impossible to decipher movement where the kid had been standing a moment before, and then rather than spinning in the horizontal axis as he jumped towards the youthful _gweilo_, he was actually heading up in the air in an arc over the blond kid's head, rotating end over end. He managed four complete piked somersaults as he rose to over eight feet in the air and then plummeted back to earth, although he was clearly already out cold as he flew. He landed head first on the stone flags in a tangle of arms and legs with a sickening 'splat'.

The blond youth turned sadly towards Sammy and begun trudging unhappily in his direction. "That _so_ didn't need to happen!", said the youth shaking his head. "Please, just drop me on Fung-Mat road, that really is all I ask…".

But Sammy was quite white and shaking like a leaf. He had just seen the blond kid contemptuously toy with and then, he thought quite likely kill with one kick, the most terrifyingly dangerous person he had ever previously met, right in front of him, and now the new most dangerous person he had ever met was advancing towards him. He realised that the feeling had returned to his right arm. Well, it was now painful and he could apparently move his fingers again. He fumbled desperately under the neckline of his T-shirt until his trembling hand closed on the whistle that hung there on a lanyard, pulled it to his lips, and blew as hard as he could for as long as he could.

The blond youth stopped, and for the first time, Sammy thought he saw fear flicker across his face.

"What did you just do?", asked the youth in an accusing tone.

Sammy said nothing, merely cringed.

Around him, he could hear the distant slam of doors, the sound of running feet and further whistle blasts. But none of those things would save him if this… _killer gweilo_… decided to take revenge on him now before his own fate was sealed as it inevitably shortly would be.

"Did you just do what I think you did?", asked the blond youth, accusingly?

Sammy still cringed.

"Oh man… you _so_ didn't want to do that. And this is _so_ not going to end well...", said the blond youth, his shoulders sagging even further, as he turned round and started trudging miserably back more deeply into the courtyard.

This was not the reaction Sammy had been expecting. Out the corner of his eye, he spotted the pink hairless _thing_ on the parcel shelf of the Mercedes. It had its hand over its face and was shaking its little pink head equally sadly.

Did the _gweilo_ expect to take on the entire population of The Craphole and defeat them with his bare hands? Was there an army of equally dangerous _gweilo_ waiting outside the gate to come to his aid? Quarter of an hour ago he would have automatically assumed that the blond geek was delusional to the point of suicidal insanity. Now he was even more scared than he had been when the youth had started walking towards him after he had disposed of the raging Lo Fung so effortlessly and brutally .

By now the balconies and walkways of The Craphole were lined with people who had responded to The Craphole attack alarm, and looking to see what had provoked somebody to give the call to arms. The first to reach the blond kid, though, were the four men who had been working on ringing the two cars on ramps at the far end of the courtyard. They had apparently seen what fate had befallen Lo Fung, and were advancing on the _gweilo_ armed with the tools of their trade; crowbars, a lump hammer and the dismounted blade from a sheet metal guillotine. But apparently, the _gweilo_ was done trying to talk people down, because as the four burly armed men came at him, there was a blur of movement, and they all flew in different directions within a second of each other, the clatter of their weapons hitting the ground masking the noise that their bodies made as they too slammed into the ground at different points of the compass.

All at once, the vast audience ranged around the courtyard knew who their foe was, and there was a mass stampede of feet, some for the stairs, others back into their boltholes to arm themselves and _then_ head for the stairs.

"You can stop this!", yelled the blonde youth frantically, apparently talking to Sammy. But Sammy knew he couldn't. He had no idea what was going to happen now, but whatever it was it was terrifyingly completely out of Sammy's control, despite him having set the events in motion. Already the residents from the ground floor of The Craphole were gravitating towards the youth, and a couple of seconds after his plaintive cry, he was cut off from Sammy and the Mercedes by a heaving mass of humanity, and that was before the tide of angry young men running down the stairs piled in.

However, as the _gweilo_ vanished from his view, they clearly hadn't overwhelmed him yet, as Sammy could hear screams and the sounds of cries of pain and cracking bone from somewhere on the other side of the crowd. In fact, after a few seconds, the intensity and frequency of the screams grew, and suddenly the crowd started to flow the other way. As Sammy watched in some amazement, it thinned a little and expanded, and Sammy could once again see the lethal teenager, who had obtained a set of Nunchaka from somewhere and was twirling them about himself in very rapid and intricate patterns. Round him lay a large number of prone bodies, some rolling around in pain, others very still, some with limbs in very unnatural positions. The kid himself seemed to be standing on top of a small cairn of bodies, and every couple of seconds there was a 'thwack' as the free end of the rice-flail impacted some part of an assailant. But incredibly, for now he had opened some clear space around himself, and he started trying to make his way down from his mound of unconscious (or worse) bodies and head towards Sammy, who realised that he was still intent on getting his ride to the damned harbour!

Of course, the moment he began moving, the emboldened crowd, now reinforced by more people making their way down from the upper floors, tried to fall on him en-masse again. This time some amongst their number were armed with knives, meat cleavers and a variety of improvised clubs, and again Sammy didn't expect him to emerge from the melee in one piece.

He should have done, though. This time, Sammy heard the unmistakeable sound of the clash of steel on steel, the screams became louder and more frantic, and when the crowd pressing in on the blond _gweilo_ eventually broke and ran this time, it exploded much more quickly and in total disarray. A scene of carnage was revealed. The teenage geek's sweater and cargo pants were splattered with blood, and judging by the severed limbs (many holding lethal weapons still clasped in their lifeless hands) and maimed bodies which were strewn around him, none of it was his. For his part he was crouching in a low stance, a sword held in an aggressive posture over his head. As Sammy watched, numb with disbelief, Chet Lok Pak, who Sammy knew well as somebody who ran a fine crooked dice game around the back alleys and pavement café's of Hong Kong Island and was definitely a lover not a fighter, suddenly decided for no sane reason to charge headlong at the terrifying youth with a meat cleaver held over his head. Perhaps he had seen one too many of his own friends slain or maimed by this… this… Sammy didn't have the words… but whatever his reasons, it was the last thing he ever did, as the blond geek sliced him lengthwise into two pieces from shoulder to hip in a welter of frothing blood.

The blond kid shook the blood from the blade of the sword, and then resumed his stately progress back towards Sammy and the Mercedes. But he had only gone a couple of steps when a knife whizzed past his head. Within a couple of seconds, total pandemonium broke loose as the surviving residents of The Craphole who were now pressed back against the sides of the courtyard began pelting the blond kid with missiles from all sides. The kid was dodging as many as he could, and swatting others away, but at least one hit him, although luckily for him it didn't put him down, and it emboldened the rock throwers. When the first rocks and bricks started coming down from above as well, it looked like the kid was probably going to go down after all, and judging by what he had done to so many residents of The Craphole already, there probably wasn't going to be much left of him at the end of all this by the time the angry vengeful young men with the meat cleavers had finished their work.

However, the sword he was carrying suddenly morphed into a large shield, Sammy saw it happen, and recent experience had taught him that the impossible was the new normal. The rocks falling from above bounced off the shield like particularly lethal hailstones, but the more horizontal missiles continued to fly towards the kid, who continued to dodge them athletically, until at some point he appeared to lose patience with the fact that he was pinned down, and suddenly he was performing eye-wateringly rapid spinning kicks that caught the missiles in mid-air and fired them back whence they came in rapid succession. A dozen of the missile throwing crowd gathered around the perimeter of the courtyard were struck hard by very fast moving projectiles and sent flying, or in one case had his face caved in by a brick he had thrown moments earlier. The volume of projectiles thrown at ground level was immediately reduced, and some of the rock throwers were forced back into the horseshoe shaped former barrack block. Gradually the blond kid was able to clear the courtyard of anybody still able to move under their own power, while protecting himself from the rain of debris from above with the large shield. And then, still under a rain of missiles from above, he once again took a step towards Sammy, with an expression that Sammy could only describe as hang-dog on his face.

At that moment, Sammy was shocked to hear a loud percussive report from somewhere above him, and hear the echoing whining splash of a ricocheting bullet off of stone. 'A gun?', thought Sammy. 'Here? Idiot! Mind you, it might be the only thing that can stop him!'.

Sammy looked up, just in time to see his co-conspirator and ideas man Billy Chin, standing way up on the roof and pointing a revolver down into the courtyard, fire a second shot.

This time, Sammy saw the shower of sparks as the bullet hit the shield. Unexpectedly, given the apparently thin metal, it did not penetrate, or even mark the surface. However, it clearly did hit with the force of a giant boulder dropped from above - the blond kid was hammered to the floor by the impact and grunted in pain. At which point, Sammy heard Billy yell "Now!", and suddenly a burning Molotov cocktail landed in the courtyard directly in front of the terrifyingly lethal blond geek, and exploded into a ball of fire. Two or three more were following it, aimed at the spot where the kid was pinned down behind the fireball that may have already engulfed him, and there were a further four gunshots.

'Nicely done, Billy', thought Sammy.

But only for a second, as it became obvious that the kid was no longer where the Molotov's had landed. When the fireballs evaporated, he was revealed to be running as fast as he could, which was apparently very fast indeed, towards the chop shop at the other end of the courtyard. Gone was his shield, and in it place he once again held the sword. Rocks, bricks and bottles pelted the ground around him as he ran, but nobody had apparently quite got his range as he moved at lightning speed and with subtle changes of course and pace along the way, and he reached his objective within a few seconds, long before Billy Chin had been able to reload the revolver he had obtained from somewhere, or indeed before the Molotov throwers had been able to move their crate of ammunition to the other end of the roof.

Sammy found himself yelling "Noooooo" involuntarily when he saw, a millisecond before it happened, exactly what the blond geek had in mind. The blade slashed horizontally, and improbably, straight through the top of the two gas bottles mounted on the trolley that sat between the two cars that had been in the process of having their identities changed. In one smooth and unimaginably fast movement, the blonde kid had ruptured an almost full bottle of pressurised Oxygen and a similar one of Acetylene, but also in the process disentangled them from the hoses and regulators attached to the valves that had been atop them, so that when he continued the movement and kicked the very heavy bottle trolley in just the right place, it was free to fly straight through the adjacent doorway and into the ground floor of The Craphole. The blond kid, meanwhile had dropped into a crouch, was now glowing bright blue like a neon shop sign and was huddled behind a very large shield that he had, once again, seemingly conjured from nowhere.

Sammy saw all this happen seemingly in slow motion, as he himself was already falling towards the ground in terror. In truth, he had expected the bottles to blow in the open and take out the kid and anybody in the courtyard, including Sammy, but he had reckoned without the kid impossibly (there was that word again) kicking them into the building. What actually happened was worse. Much worse. The giant explosion occurred inside the ground floor of the old barrack building at the bottom of the horseshoe. The back wall of The Craphole was effectively the rock face of the old quarry and an indestructible blast wall. The front wall of the lower two floors were constructed using the already quarried heavy stone blocks that were left in the old quarry when it closed down; had The Craphole been built throughout with the sub-standard concrete typical of wartime Japanese construction in Hong Kong, it would have long since collapsed under the combination of its own weight and decay. A construction approach designed to make Japanese Imperial Barracks Sham Tseng resistant to any allied bomb that might fall into the quarry itself now conspired to trap the huge blast and deflect it around the horseshoe internally. Although a small fireball and a wall of rubble and dust shot back in the direction of the geek, apparently engulfing him (although the blue glow was still clearly visible through the smoke), by far the larger part of the explosion rolled around inside the building, destroying internal structures and sending fireballs and showers of debris, along with the odd resident, shooting out of window after window around the horseshoe, until finally twin fireballs erupted from the doors either side of where Sammy was now lying, which marked the end of the horseshoe shaped Barrack building. The flames from the two fireballs comingled above his head as he lay on the ground and then were sucked back into the building with a hideous 'whoosh' as the intense fireball consumed all the oxygen within the confined space. And then, with a terrible roar, starting at the base of the horseshoe, the seat of the explosion, the entire building began to collapse in on itself, as the lower two floors lost structural integrity and the improvised structures built on top of them over the decades caved into the void. There was a terrible rumbling roaring sound that seemed to go on for hours, but probably only lasted a couple of minutes, and then total, awful silence.

After a while, Sammy opened his eyes, picked himself up slowly and looked at a scene of total devastation all around him. Fires burnt freely all over the heaped horseshoe of rubble that had once been The Craphole. In the middle, scattered rubble, dusty and burnt bodies, body parts and gore liberally covered the courtyard. Choking dust hung everywhere. The silence wasn't just oppressive, it felt like it weighed a tonne and lay heavily upon him as he stood alone in hell. He realised that he could see Billy to his left. Billy was looking straight at him. Sadly, Billy could not see him - his sightless eyes stared, obviously terror-struck in the moment of death, from through the top layer of the smoking rubble.

Perhaps he was also dead?

Perhaps he just wished he was.

And then… movement. He knew what it would be. Perhaps this was now his time? Perhaps the many sins he had committed in his short life were about to catch up with him? Sammy didn't believe in gods or demons, being a rational sort of soul. Or… hadn't. He could feel his personal belief system evaporating and reforming as he watched a gawky American teenager glowing a neon blue and marching towards him through the carnage, silhouetted against the burning rubble around the seat of the explosion, a sword at least metaphorically dripping with the blood of most of the people he knew and all of the people he had called 'friend' for any of the last ten years still in his hand.

He was resigned to his death now. It would be a blessed release.

Instead, the _gweilo_ marched up to him and suddenly returned to his normal colour. Amazingly, although his clothes were covered in dust, blood and gore, his face, hands and hair were miraculously dust free; it must be something to do with the blue glow, thought Sammy numbly.

The blond demon held his sword in front of him and there was a loud pop as it transformed itself into a tiny shield, which the fourth horseman of the apocalypse dropped into his pocket.

"I told you that you really didn't want to do this!", he said vacantly. Then he added "Fung-Mat road. Now. Get me there before 5:30 or I'll be very unhappy indeed."

The demon pointed at the car, which seemed to be coated in dust and have picked up a crack in the passenger side of the windscreen and a dent in the bonnet, but was otherwise apparently unscathed.

'OK… not dead yet…', thought Sammy. On autopilot, he went to climb into the car, as the demon did likewise, surprised to see the ugly pink think unlocking his door for him first. He climbed in and started the engine, then reversed out with a clatter over the now horizontal and unguarded corrugated iron gate. Looking at the dash clock, he realised that if he was going to get the demon to his next appointment on time, and possibly not spend tonight in hell, he was going to have to floor it.

So he did.

As he drove as quickly as he could, oblivious to the far less significant risk to his well-being of attracting police attention, he could hear a bizarre conversation behind him, between the demon and the ugly pink talking rat-thing. He listened in, glad of the distraction. There were things he absolutely didn't want to think about right now.

"It really wasn't my fault, Rufus. There was nothing else I could do. There were too many of them and they were all trying to kill me. All of them. If this taxi driver hadn't set the baying mob on me, it would never have happened. It was awful...", said the demon.

"Awww…Yup, awful… horrible...", said the ugly pink thing, sympathetically.

"All those people. Dead. I'm starting to understand why they hid the idols the way they did, though. Mystical monkey power , no love…", said the demon bitterly.

"Aww… no mystical monkey power, no Ron though…", chittered the ugly pink rodent.

"No mystical monkey power, no Yamanouchi, no mission to Hong Kong!", said the demon bitterly.

"Mmmm… true…", said the ugly pink thing…

To be honest, Sammy had been starting to tune out ever since he had heard the demon blame him for the carnage. The words of the evil _gweilo_ bounced around inside his head like a ricocheting bullet. _If this taxi driver hadn't set the baying mob on me, it would never have happened._

As they drove rapidly back towards Hong Kong island, police cars, fire engines and ambulances began to pass them travelling the other way, firstly in ones and twos, then great streams of them, obviously all rushing to the scene of the catastrophe at The Craphole. No wonder nobody was paying attention to Sammy's squealing tyres and take-no-prisoners overtaking style as he raced the devil (or the devil's watch at least) to Fung-Mat road.

_All those people. Dead._

He made it with minutes to spare, pulling up near a temporary marquee on the waterfront with gaudily coloured flags fluttering above it. The demon took the keys from him without a word, went round to the back of the car and fiddled in the boot for a few moments, and then leaving it open, began walking not towards the tent, but towards a gap between two articulated lorries just next to the car, without a backwards glance.

_All those people. Dead._

_If this taxi driver hadn't set the baying mob on me, it would never have happened._

Sammy climbed out of the car to shut the boot and retrieve the car keys, sneaking a look between the trucks as he passed. The demon was nowhere to be seen. He quickly climbed back into the car and started the engine, heading away from Fung Mat road as fast as he could. It was only when he glanced in the mirror at the receding marquee that he saw an entirely different man dressed all in black carrying a trunk that could have been identical to the demon's towards the entrance of the marquee…

_If this taxi driver hadn't set the baying mob on me, it would never have happened._

_If this taxi driver hadn't set the baying mob on me, it would never have happened._

_If this taxi driver hadn't set the baying mob on me, it would never have happened._

oOo

It was 10:30 that evening when the police finally caught up with Sammy, parked in a dry drainage tunnel in Kowloon. He was plastered from head to toe in dust, sitting in the Mercedes as he had been now for several hours. His eyes stared intently into the middle distance, pain lined his face. A freshly purchased hosepipe led from the exhaust pipe and in through the slightly wound down rear side window, and the engine was still running.

_All those people. Dead._


	24. On Enquiries

24. On Enquiries

As Ron "Saru Chounouryoku" Stoppable was checking himself into one of Lo Pin's reception centres in the nick of time, and as Rufus was slipping ghost-like between the security team's legs to re-join Ron on the other side of the battery of scanners, Detective Inspector Foster of the Metropolitan Police Art & Antiques Squad was sitting in a "greasy spoon" café in Clapham, with a head full of cotton wool and a stomach that was threatening to revolt on him. The old school greasy fry up of bacon, sausage, baked beans, egg, black pudding, fried tomato and mushrooms that he had just eaten had helped a lot, although the fried bread was repeating on him a little, and he really couldn't face the toast.

'Still the best hangover cure in the world, though!', he thought.

He took a swig of hot, sweet tea, and wondered idly why his Sergeant hadn't already phoned him this morning to ask where he was. He fumbled in his pocket and came out with his mobile phone, and then swore when he realised it was switched off. He assumed that the battery must have died, but he pushed the power button anyway, and to his surprise, it sprung readily to life.

And then it went insane; eighteen missed calls, since the small hours of the morning, and nine text messages, most of the calls and text messages apparently from Jim Murdoch, a couple from DI Jack Morgan, a colleague who had spared no effort to make sure that everybody knew that he was not, to say the least, Foster's greatest fan, and it appeared that his voicemail had apparently overflowed.

Foster groaned, and hit the 'Voicemail button.

After listening to the first three "Guv, where the hell are you, call me, it's urgent!" voicemail messages, he stabbed the button to end the call and dialled his Sergeant's mobile number.

The phone was answered at the first ring, and Foster could hear angry shouting in the background, he thought he recognised the Detective Chief Superintendent's voice, and then DS Murdoch said "I'll call you back in a second", in a non-committal tone, before the line went dead.

Clearly, Murdoch didn't want to let on that he had called in in front of whoever he was talking to. Something nasty was happening, and Jim Murdoch wanted to get out of the office and give him some warning. He would probably owe his DS a pint or several in due course, he realised.

Less than a minute later, his phone rang again, his Sergeant's number flashing up on the screen, and he hit the button quickly. "Jim, what's the SP?".

"Where the hell have you been, Guv? And where the hell are you now?" asked a fairly harassed sounding DS Murdoch.

"I'm out on enquiries, Jim", he replied, "...and please don't shout…".

"Out on the lash more like, you dirty stoppout", said Jim Murdoch slightly bitterly.

"Alright, alright… just tell me what the panic is, OK?", said Foster, slightly testily.

"It happened again, Guv! And it's made a right mess...", said DS Murdoch.

"What has happened again? You'd best start at the beginning…", said Foster, his head starting to throb again.

"Well, at 10:36pm last night exactly, there was a freak electrical storm over South West One. Right over the dream factory, in fact".

The dream factory. New Scotland Yard.

"No rain, again, but this storm lasted for an hour and seventeen minutes. It took out the main substation and all the control room systems, and set every alarm in the place off. We've got security camera footage from inside our secure evidence locker that shows that helmet we picked up at the museum the other day suddenly going ballistic and flying round inside the room like a mad thing, bouncing off the walls, the ceiling, the floor. It shredded everything, smashed all the shelving, put a dozen six inch dents in the armoured steel door, took big chunks out of the walls and completely shredded everything else in there. Which used to include two stolen-recovered Matisse watercolours worth half a million quid between them, a set of nicked Dutch ceramics worth a hundred and fifty grand and a shitload of other art treasures worth another million nicker between them. Oh, and _all_ the exhibits in DI Morgan's big art forgery case which starts at the Bailey today. The lot. He's in there at the moment seeing what can be salvaged, but it looks like the whole case is going to collapse. That's a two year undercover operation and millions of pounds worth of operational effort down the shitter, and a whole bunch or heavy hitters from organised art fraud who are going to walk scot free. Oh, and the helmet? Not a mark on it. The Chief Super is about to have an aneurism, and DI Morgan wants you on point duty in a tall hat for the rest of your career, he's ranting that it was deliberate sabotage and cursing your name to the roof! I had the cavalry out last night trying to find you, but you weren't answering your phone and you weren't at home or anywhere else I could think of to look. Sorry, Guv...".

"Don't apologise, Jim, thanks for holding the fort. Shit, what a balls up. OK, I'd better get back to the factory and face the music… I'll see you in a bit… one thing, though.. I reckon attack is the best form of defence. You said Jack Morgan reckons it is sabotage? Maybe he's on to something at that. What if that shiny metal hat was a deliberate plant?", DI Foster mused.

"Guv?", asked Jim Murdoch, sounding sceptical.

"Think about it. Why was it in the secure evidence locker?", asked Foster.

"Because it is worth £50,000…", said DS Murdoch.

"Right. We stuck it secure evidence because it was worth £50,000. And we know it is worth £50,000 because?", asked Foster?

"Because Dr Voss… told.. us…", said DS Murdoch, as the penny dropped with him.

"Right. And it was his museum exhibit that was supposedly turned over in a burglary with no detectable break-in… and oh look, a trial involving an international art forgery ring and a hundred hooky fake canvases punted out to unsuspecting art collectors for well over a million Euros collapses because all the evidence gets shredded… in the secure evidence store.

"Something stinks, Jim. So, I want the full works on the good Dr Voss. His bank accounts, internet access, email, and then spin his drum, and arrest him on suspicion of perverting the course of justice and assisting an offender. And turn his office over. In fact, go through the museum accounts, email, etc etc, yadda yadda. Pull all the security camera footage and cross reference with all the faces in Jack Morgan's case files, just in case anybody connected with the case paid him a visit at work any time in the last three weeks. Gather the troops, Jim, we have a lot of work to do, and no time to do it before we both end up directing traffic…", said Foster.

"Guv…", said his sergeant, sounding troubled.

"Yes, go on Jim, get it off your chest…", said Foster with a sigh.

"Well, I can see the way you are going here and yes it does make sense. But.. The electrical storm… and the helmet. It doesn't have a mark on it. I'm not sure…", said the DS.

"Listen," said Foster firmly. "Three weeks ago about a million de-activated highly advanced tiny toy robots were distributed to anybody who wanted them all over the world. All it would take would be some clever Russian mafia hacker to pull one of those apart, rewire it and work out how to build it into that shiny tin hat, and there's your magic flying helmet. And remember how the sky went dark when those giant robots were flying around the place? So I'm _still_ not seeing a single reason to call in the damned space cadets. And that goes double because if we do call in Global Justice then they will take the shiny metal hat away, we'll never see it again, and they'll tell us to go play in traffic. Then we will have nothing to investigate, and more importantly, nothing between us and the combined might of the Chief Super, 'Mental' Morgan and The Directorate of Professional Standards who will be perfectly happy to conspire together to bust us both down to Traffic Warden. So… unless we actually nick somebody for this little lot who we can prove is definitely on their damned Y list, we don't even whisper about going there. OK?"

"OK, Guv…", said a deflated Morgan.

"Oh, where's the shiny metal hat right now?", asked Foster.

"On my desk, Guv. Nowhere else to put it!", replied his DS.

"Bugger that for a game of soldiers. There's a squash court in the Blue Lamp club on the top floor. Commandeer that, stick the damned thing in there, and organise a round the clock obbo on it. If it goes mental again, I don't want my desk trashed. Some of those empty coffee mugs are antiques by now, and all that paperwork didn't get into those untidy piles by accident!", commanded Foster.

"Guv!", replied Morgan.

"Now, I want the Dr Voss in my interview room within three hours. I'll be there in one and I expect to know his entire life story before we get the thumb screws out. So, like I said, gather the troops, and don't wait for me. I'll be there as soon as I can! I'm on my way...", finished Foster.

"Guv!", replied DS Morgan again, and Foster cut the call, dropping the phone back in his pocket. 'God I could murder a fag', he thought, as he reached for his shirt pocket, and found only the nicotine gum, the thought of which almost caused his stomach to enter full on revolt.

"Love… can I have another cup of tea please? And if you have any aspirin, you could save my life", he said to the young lady who was clearing away his empty grease-laden plate and the side-plate still full of cold, congealed toast.

He wanted to get his thumping head under control before he headed for the undoubtedly loud 'interview without coffee' that he was surely due to have with the Chief Super the moment he walked into the squad office at New Scotland Yard. Blowing chunks over his boss while he was in mid rant would probably not make things go any better...


	25. Anchors Aweigh

Anchors Aweigh!

Will Du yawned expressively, and then took another sip of the complimentary champagne. He had seen Kim Possible safely aboard Lo Pin's gaudy flotilla of junks, as ordered, and now he was heading home for a long overdue period of R&R, having handed over surveillance duties to Global Justice 227.

On the one hand, he was distinctly disdainful of the whole idea of using an amateur, even one he grudgingly acknowledged was as competent as Kim Possible had proved to be.

On the other hand, having given her a Global Justice mission, even one as lightweight and inconsequential as this one, Dr Director's sudden late decision to delay the start of his leave and have him shadow her to Hong Kong, let alone to pull an asset of the value of the '227 off of its pre-assigned mission and have it standing by doing nothing for a week or so was quite incomprehensible to him.

An hour's notice for a 7 hour stealth hovership flight to get him in position ahead of Miss Possible's arrival in Hong Kong, followed by a couple of extremely unsavoury swims in the filthy odiferous soup of Hong Kong's Victoria harbour, had done nothing to improve his opinion of Global Justice's current operational priorities. Especially when he had been looking forward instead to six chukkers at the Lowerton Polo Club against the Argentinean National Polo Society touring side, followed by a celebration costume ball featuring the cream of Argentinean and local Society followed by a night of high stakes Baccarat.

On the flip side, although it was only the fact that Global Justice was so… comfortably resourced… that allowed such profligacy as sending Tier 1 agents, let alone the South China Sea command centre, on a babysitting mission for a precocious brat in the first place, it also ensured that the staff travel budget was… commensurately generous. Which meant he was flying back to Middleton in a very civilised Business Class seat instead of crammed into coach with the screaming babies and plastic cutlery.

Once he had landed in Middleton and reported in at HQ, he'd be free to head home to sleep. After another hour in the shower to try to finally remove the lingering nostril-wrinkling taint of 'Eau de Victoria Harbour' and the gallon of aftershave he had doused himself with to temporarily mask it, anyway. And then tomorrow he could finally saddle up for a bit of civilised sport. After Kim Possible had ruined the genteel and relaxed game of Golf for him forever by introducing him to Duff Killigan, Polo was now his chosen recreation of choice.

Of course, balancing his missed Polo match, it was thanks to the well above espionage industry standard and entirely tax-exempt Global Justice benefits package that Will could afford to indulge himself; even his small string of Polo ponies was… well, it wasn't the most expensive hobby maintained by loyal Global Justice operatives, but you'd not be doing it on a spook's or law enforcement salary if you worked for anyone else, that's for sure.

He knew of course that in theory he was on stand-by and could be called back to duty if there was a need to extract Kim Possible from Lo-Pin's tournament, but as far as he could tell, Miss Possible was on a barely disguised vacation rather than a mission, and as… unsavoury… as Lo Pin's business activities might be, he wasn't any concern of Global Justice. So, unless Dr Director had another brain fart, he could look forward to a week of uninterruptedly blissful equine R&R, in the company of the cosmopolitan jet set amongst whom he felt most at ease.

But for now, it looked to Will as if the flight attendant was coming down the aisle again with the open Jeroboam of Krug, and Will Du decided that another glass of champers to further wash down the excellent Fillet Mignon dinner would be... most agreeable.

There were very many _far_ worse jobs in the world for a man with his particular skill-set, he reflected. And very few indeed that were better paid...

oOo

Shego awoke with a start and took a moment to remember where she was, before relaxing, stretching and enjoying the glorious feeling of crisp, clean Egyptian cotton sheets against her now equally clean skin. She hadn't wanted to take another cat-nap with the ship still anchored in Victoria harbour, and potentially vulnerable to assault, so she had used the afternoon profitably, with the storm covers on her stateroom firmly sealed against the eye-searingly flickering green flashes, by engaging in a little bit of advanced titanium craftsmanship. After 4 hours painstaking work, she had finished fabricating, and then artistically embellishing, a pair of the finest Sai Swords she had ever personally seen or handled, using Grade-5 titanium offcuts liberated from the scrap recycling bins outside the R&D workshops of a major aerospace manufacturing company she had been fortunate enough to ride past the front gate of on the way across Europe, just at the start of a shift change.

She hadn't even needed to get off the bike or move outside of its enveloping bubble of invisibility, let alone risk stealing anything anybody might actually connect with her. Just in and out in 5 minutes, stealthily and invisibly past the security post and under an open barrier, tailgating company staff.

A little later she would fill the cabin's steel waste bin with cold water and place it in the shower tray as an improvised quench bath, so that she could heat treat these newly fabricated works of art with her hands at 900 degrees centigrade, before plunging them into the ice cold water to rapidly cool them and harden them. But first, she needed to check that they were perfectly balanced. And to do that, she needed to do some serious Sai twirling. Assuming she could remember how. She had barely touched a Sai and certainly not wielded one for a dozen years now; why would you ever bother with weapons if you had hands that could burn almost as hot as the sun itself?

A few experimental twirls in her stateroom hinted that she was rusty but could still manage the basics just fine, and that the Sai were both there or thereabouts in balance, but only 'going for it' properly would prove that she didn't need to shave a few grams off of the two beautifully etched and decorated Titanium Sai here or there, and that was best done before the final heat-treatment.

She had needed more space than the stateroom provided, but she hadn't fancied drawing undue attention to herself while they were still in harbour, so she had decided to wait until they were well out at sea before hitting the deck and seeing what she still remembered.

At about six in the afternoon local time, according to the wall clock in her stateroom, she had heard a motor dhow draw up alongside the ship, and had peered cautiously outside to check that it wasn't anything she needed to worry about; it turned out to be the security crew from one of the reception centres with a number of crates that corresponded to the scanners she had seen when she had checked in herself. They were hauled on board, one by one, with a deck crane and then the security crew came aboard and the dhow chugged away from the ship as the landing stage was hauled aboard. A few minutes later, Shego had heard the unexpected sound of what she had been surprised to recognise as a gas turbine engine winding up to operating rpm, accompanied by the clank of anchor chains and the whine of the electric capstans and the sound of running feet as the ship made ready to leave port.

Soon the flotilla of four junks had been motoring slowly out of the harbour in line astern formation, and Shego had felt confident enough to grab a quick catnap for an hour or so.

Now, there was no turbine whine and from the way the ship moved, Shego could tell that the junk was under sail. Quickly she dressed, checking in the bathroom mirror to ensure that no green-tinged flesh would be visible to an observer, and pausing only to retrieve a bottle of chilled water from the small well-stocked refrigerator and the two titanium Sai swords which were temporarily doing duty as door spikes to give her warning of any uninvited visitations, and headed for the deck.

When she emerged topside, it was into a gentle evening breeze, as the sun dipped towards the horizon over the stern, over the tips of Hong Kong's tallest buildings, all that was still visible of the former colony. The four junks were sailing close together in a line abreast formation. The battened Junk-rig sails were full, the rigging creaked, and the ship very gently rolled. Occasionally, electric winches buried in the gunwales whined briefly, pulling in or paying out small amounts of high-tech rope, obviously intent on keeping the canvas optimally trimmed for the gentle airs propelling them in an easterly direction. A handful of crew members went about their business, mostly maintenance tasks so far as Shego could tell, and seemed to be entirely ignoring her.

She found a clear area of deck in front of the main-mast and began some basic warm-up exercises. She swore as her right shoulder flared with pain momentarily. Her right arm really was still giving her real gyp.

Her superficial injuries were behind her now, her skin scarred but healed, and her alien metabolism had even rebuilt her ruined knee and elbow ligaments, wrecked knee cartilage and torn right shoulder rotator cuff. The deep muscle injuries and sprung sternum had also healed well. But that old bugbear, scar tissue, was still slowing her down, and until it broke down she was wary of re-injuring her left hamstring, which could easily re-tear around the scar tissue, and her right pectoral muscle and bicep were similarly compromised.

The hamstring was getting better every day, as she worked it every time she walked on it, but what she needed for the remaining upper body injuries was a bit of percussive massage - bluntly, she needed either the services of a good Turkish style masseur, or somebody to kick the crap out of the affected area for her. It would hurt like a bitch, but the 're-tenderised' muscles would heal again quickly enough - within a few hours in fact, without the big lumps of scar tissue that would easily take three months to dissolve left to their own devices.

Obviously, given that she wanted to stay dead for a while, available massage options were somewhat limited; 'Where better to find somebody to kick the crap out of my injured muscles than at a martial arts tournament, though?', she asked herself.

The trick was finding somebody to spar with who she could read well enough that she could afford to drop her guard against without getting her head knocked off when she was expecting to get her arm pummelled. Not getting clobbered was one thing. Getting clobbered just the way you expected to get clobbered was... not something she had really practiced much. 'Where's the spoilt brat when you need her?', she wondered, idly.

It suddenly occurred to her that if she could find a Wing Chun dummy somewhere on Lo-Pin's island, she could use that to tenderise her upper arm and her left thigh, but the pectoral muscle really would need some good old-fashioned clobbering by somebody else.

Once she felt everything was as loose as it was going to get, she dredged a basic Sai Sword form from the recesses of her memory and set to work. Once upon a time she knew she'd been good at this. Damned good. World class in fact. What had 12 years of neglect done to her skills?

She surprised herself. Apparently, she remembered more than she thought she would. It was all a tiny bit ragged by the standards she had once set herself, and her body wasn't moving with the freedom she desperately wanted it to, but she quickly progressed through form after form, moving surprisingly competently onto routines that had once won her cups and adulation in equal measure, as long atrophied skills were rekindled and the happy memories associated with them temporarily crowded the normal undercurrent of dark brooding thoughts out of her mind. Even the tiny miscues in the forms and routines she was resurrecting from long buried history caused only the briefest of scowls to briefly cross her face, as with every complex and long unpractised sequence that she more or less nailed, she became more certain that with only a little revision work she would be back to where she had once been, a couple of months over 12 years previously. The Sai were just perfectly balanced as well, both in the twirl and in flight. She could heat-treat them now with confidence!

She decided to take a hydration break, at the end of the form that had, performed with slightly more grace, poise and freedom of movement, taken three open class weapon form titles at City, Division and State level back in the 1990's for a 12 year old White Ninja.

She grabbed the bottle of water, and headed into a small alcove in the lee of the deck house, placing it between her and the other four ships of the flotilla, before lifting the hood of her shinobo shozeki just enough to get her lips around the top of the cool bottle and taking a good swig, swilling the water around her mouth before swallowing, confident that she was protected from observation. The she replaced the cap, adjusted her hood carefully, and re-emerged onto her chosen deck space, glancing across the bobbing line of three ships to starboard as she did so.

She stopped in mid-pace, and her jaw dropped. On the deck of the nearest junk, roughly in the same part of the upper deck of that ship as Shego was currently standing on Lo Pin's flagship, stood quite the most… extraordinary… man.

Admittedly, his mode of dress, or more specifically the lack of it, might have something to do with the impression he was making on her; a pair of what looked like tiny and ridiculously clingy stretch-lycra briefs were all that protected his modesty (but in reality they served rather more to… highlight… what they contained), as he wielded a large oar with intent. The target of that intent was a black shinobi shozeki that looked far too small for him, but which was yielding great clouds of dust every time the blade of the oar slapped it.

However, Shego wasn't looking at the garment he was beating. She was instead looking at the way his absolutely breathtaking physique, which was glistening slightly under a sheen of sweat that highlighted his truly stunning musculature most effectively, moved and twitched as he athletically laid into the black garment with the heavy wooden paddle. She had no idea what on earth he had been doing with it, but the clouds of dust that blew away on the breeze after every violent slap of the oar didn't seem to be diminishing. From Shego's perspective, the longer beating the dust out of his clothing took absolutely the finest piece of male eye candy she could ever remember seeing bar none, the better.

'Now THAT is a boy toy…', thought Shego, unconsciously licking her lips. He made Senor Senior Junior, who she had once… extensively educated… look like a pre-pubescent cave troll!

It didn't help matters that Shego was, not to put too fine a point on it, starting to get just a little tiny bit sexually frustrated.

Nothing could have been further from her mind, when she had awoken on the beach on Ilha de Santo Antão; if getting her rocks off _had_ for some bizarre reason occurred to her there and then , the fact that she had badly scalded every inch of her flesh, yes all of it, including the most sensitive membranes, and then immersed it all in salt water for an entire day before grinding volcanic sand into it would have pretty much ensured that her first thought on the subject would have surely been her last. Two sleepless days of agony, intense physical exertion and stress had followed, by which time her dermis at least had healed, and then a long night of the sleep of the dead once she had reached the chateaux had allowed her to wake up rested and to think momentarily about jilling off.

Think about it, but not to actually do it.

No sooner had she hobbled into the shower after waking in a bed for the first time in a week, than a chirrup from the entry-phone had signalled the arrival of Andre Montgolfier, setting in train a series of events that had brought her here without any opportunity to scratch that itch whatsoever. She had been looking forward to getting her rocks off in the shower in her cabin, until she discovered that the showerhead was bolted solidly to the junk's bulkhead.

Which rather stymied her.

Sheila Go had first discovered the joys of solitary self stimulation a couple of years before the comet turned her life upside down. In the absence of a school health class, or anything resembling a relationship with her mother, it had fallen by default to an excruciatingly embarrassed Amelia to guide young Sheila through the physical and emotional minefield of puberty, and she had - despite both of them very obviously wishing that the ground would swallow them whole every time Sheila felt moved to ask any of 'those' questions - done a remarkably good job of delivering Sheila into young adulthood with a healthy and well informed attitude to her sexual and physical development.

Unfortunately, there's nothing in any book anywhere that can prepare a young teenage girl for what happens when she suddenly finds herself equipped with hands that can suddenly turn into welding torches in moments of extreme emotion or stress. What happened to her would never happen now, given the same circumstances - she had soon learnt how to properly control her power - but back then, her first post-catastrophe attempt at teasing the little man in the canoe ended in her last ever orgasm by her own hand, a bed and very quickly a hotel room ablaze and some agonising burn injuries.

It was a formative experience, as excruciatingly embarrassing as it was painful. She was grateful that Amelia was there for her, still on bail awaiting trial, to fend off Henry and his moronic questions, deal with the hotel management and get her to hospital without dying of embarrassment or being arrested for arson; she didn't know about her incredible healing ability at the time. Well, not until injuries that the doctors assumed might well be fatal and certainly life-changing had healed completely within ten days. But the trauma left her with a frustrating and insurmountable psychological scar; ever since that day she could diddle away for hours with her fingers and her subconscious would never let her achieve release. It was a super-powered sexual hang-up all of her own making.

Of course she had always worked round it. Shower heads were definitely a girl's best friend. And over the years she had developed some very nifty ceramic battery powered toys for herself, made of the same insulating material that NASA had used to make the heat-resistant tiles on the space shuttle. But they were all unavailable to her now, and would be for probably as long as she wanted to stay dead. If she'd had 20/20 foresight she would have stashed something at the Chateaux, but when she had put together the emergency equipment caches for her bolt-holes, plasma-proof sex toys had hardly featured on her list of priorities.

But… none of that would matter, if Mr Sex on a Stick was a viable option for an entertaining one night stand during the forthcoming tournament!

Of course, it was probably a non-starter. She couldn't risk outing herself to anybody who could conceivably blab about being visited nocturnally by a reincarnated Shego, and nobody was ever going to mistake her for anybody else. But… well, she owed it to herself to check him out all the same. Just in case…

Shego stood and stared, drinking in the view and fully appreciating the impromptu show, for at least ten minutes. Eventually, the efforts of the modern day Adonis were rewarded as the black garment that was hanging on a rope strung across the deck of the adjacent junk gave forth no more dust, however hard it was beaten, and the chiselled god put up his oar. As he retrieved the black garment, he noticed his audience for the first time, and waved at her with a cheery self-conscious grin. Shego, to her chagrin, waved back like a giddy school girl. And then scowled to herself under the hood of her shinobo-shozeki. 'Get a grip, woman! Have you never seen a himbo before?'.

And then he was gone, and she went back to her work with the Sai swords, running through the form she had reprised before her water break and then moving on through the rest of her long forgotten repertoire, pushing all thoughts of the tall, dark, incredibly handsome stranger out of her mind. Well, almost all…

oOo

Kim sat in the lee of the deckhouse of the junk on the far right hand ('Starboard… it's starboard…', she told herself) end of the flotilla, enjoying the lapping of the waves, the rolling of the ship, the wheeling of the gulls and the whole novel ambience of a large ship under sail on the high seas. She had been delighted to discover, after she was shown to her beautifully appointed cabin, that even anchored in Victoria harbour, the movement of the ship seemed to be the key to nightmare free sleep. She hadn't even intended to have forty winks, she had just laid on the bed fully clothed and rested her eyes for a moment, and then suddenly it was several hours later and she was awoken by the whine of the engines and the sound of the anchors being weighed.

After a quick shower, she had dressed in a simple karate gi and a pair of wooden sandals and made her way topside, and here she had been sitting ever since, watching the port facilities and the Hong Kong skyline slide by, and then as the ships moved past what were obviously the outer marker buoys for the main navigable channel into Victoria Harbour, the sails had unfurled themselves without apparent human intervention, and the amount of commercial sea traffic around them had gradually thinned, before the four junks had turned hard to starboard into line abreast formation and headed away from the coastal sea-lanes.

Now the sun was touching the horizon behind them, the last of Hong Kong's sky scrapers had vanished from sight and Kim was starting to feel a little peckish, having not eaten since breakfast. She had seen the cabin service menu in her stateroom, presented in eight languages, featuring a limited range of cuisine from a dozen traditions, including western food. She could, were she so moved, order a toasted cheese sandwich, but the stir-fry option appealed more.

She sighed, contentedly.

Presently, she got to her feet and stretched languorously, turning to look across the impressive flotilla of junks ploughing through the waves in full sail.

Her eye was drawn to a distant figure on the deck of the furthermost ship. It was obviously a woman, in a white shinobi-shozeki, and she was performing some intricate and impressive Sai Sword forms. Something about the way she moved reminded her of Shego. No surprise, reflected Kim - she'd been seeing Shego in the patterns made by the creamer in her morning coffee since she had heard of her untimely demise. But still, this woman had something of the Shego about her. An older, stiffer, less assured, less precise Shego, she assumed, but still graceful. And obviously not wearing green and black. Shego had never handled a brace of Sai Sword's to Kim's knowledge, either. But still, Kim was impressed. Perhaps she would get an opportunity to test herself against that woman in the coming tournament; Kim certainly hoped so.

She headed towards the companionway, stir fry chicken firmly on her mind…

oOo

Ron headed away from his stateroom towards the staircase that would take him back to the deck, now clean after a quick shower, and dressed in another of the black shinobi-shozeki from his trunk, with the wet and hopefully now equally clean garment that he had earlier beaten the worst of the dust from the... incident... out of.

It would probably dry quite quickly in the breeze if he hung it out up on deck for a couple of hours, he thought.

His mind was a whirl. He wished he could talk to somebody about what had happened. Actually, he wished he could talk to Kim. He had exhausted Rufus's limited insight into the situation within ten minutes of the little pink rodent indicating that there were no surveillance cameras or microphones in their cabin; he had diligently scanned the cabin with the little electronic gizmo that Sensei had provided for him, and had given Ron the all clear within five minutes, but beyond empathy and sympathy, he had had little deeper to offer.

Existential questions of morality and personal responsibility were not really Rufus's realm; broadly speaking, anything you couldn't eat was of limited concern to the little fellow. Whereas they were meat and drink to Kim. However, he imagined that even Kim would seriously struggle with "Hey, Kim, imagine that you had just had to kill 200 people to save yourself and one of your best friends from certain violent death by their hand… what should you feel about it?".

He had gone over it in his mind time and time again. He hadn't been wearing the Cuff of Sosumiha when… it… had happened, so he couldn't blame those flashbacks for the way… things had turned out.

But despite his best efforts, he couldn't blame himself either.

He had replayed the events moment by moment and looked for a point where he could have made a different choice that would have led to a better, less horrific outcome. No choice that wouldn't have resulted in his own death or at best maiming presented itself to him. Even if he had abandoned his mission and chosen to run away after that rat-faced cabbie had blown his whistle, it would have surely meant abandoning Rufus to the murderous mob, so that was no option at all, even with 20/20 hindsight.

The one thing that those flashbacks had previously shown him was that almost two millennia ago, Mystical Monkey Power had been a byword for bloody carnage on a scale that had previously been unimaginable to him. Now, he knew that it still was.

In many ways, he had hoped that he _could_ blame himself for what happened. It would be _easier_ to wallow in self pity, to curse and hate himself for the mistake he made that led to the deaths of hundreds of people by his own hand.

But he couldn't.

Without Mystical Monkey Power, even that slow-witted man with the baseball bat would probably have been the death of him. It was only his attempts not to use violence against the insane ranting man who had then attacked him that had resulted in _his_ death; he had left Ron no defensive options other than to use a 'Wooden Monkey Whips The Flying Baboon' kick to deflect his final murderous attack, and the fact that he had landed head first really was his pure poor fortune. After that, Ron had been fighting merely to stay alive! When somebody started shooting real bullets and throwing petrol bombs at him, he had again only had one desperate option.

He had been voluntarily following Kim into ridiculously dangerous situations for years now, but he couldn't remember ever being the personal focus of so much collective hatred and violence. Was _that_ a side-effect of mystical monkey power? Or just a side-effect of not having Kim alongside him as a human lightning rod. And how had Kim so competently fought her way out of so many life or death situations without so much as a drop of human blood on her hands? He would love to ask her now, but he was afraid of what she might tell him about his own inadequacies. Would she say something about great power coming with great responsibility?

Should he have sacrificed his own life and that of his tiny pink pet to save the lives of those trying to kill him? Ron had searched his soul carefully and concluded not.

If anybody had told him before he had 'volunteered' for this mission that he would have killed _anybody_, let alone tens, _hundreds_ of people before the mission had even started , he would have walked away then and there in horror.

On the other hand, he imagined what might have happened if Hirotaka had found himself in the same situation that Ron had. Perhaps he would have dealt with the gorilla with the bat, perhaps even with the insanely ranting but skilful and powerful lunatic - although that wouldn't have been easy. But he would surely have been hacked to pieces by the mob. And if Ron had decided not to step up, he would therefore now have Hirotaka's death on his conscience. In addition, the two Yamanouchi agents would still be incarcerated on Lo Pin's island, and.. well, he doubted that Yamanouchi, still less Yori, would have allowed Hirotaka's death to go un-avenged, so it was very possible that the fate of many of the residents of that quarry was sealed the moment the taxi driver picked up a Yamanouchi ninja, any Yamanouchi ninja, and tried to shake him down.

But Mystical Monkey Power was clearly far more dangerous than Sensei realised. He _hoped_ at least that if Sensei _had_ understood what the return of Mystical Monkey Power would mean, he would have been less enthusiastic about it and much more cautious about Ron using it.

Well, now that the Ronmeister knew, he decided, there would be no more killing. He felt the tremendous responsibility of his ancient magical power weighing him down. And he realised that perhaps his Camp Wannaweep inspired monkey issues had been far more prescient and rational than he had been led to believe by… well, everybody he had ever shared them with. So, he had a rescue mission to fulfil, and there was surely no reason why anybody else should die by his hand. That was something easily said, but apparently harder to achieve. When he next got back to Japan, he would have to have a very serious conversation with Sensei indeed!

He emerged onto the deck, glanced to his left and nearly fell back down the stairs! A shock of very familiar red hair was just vanishing below deck, two ships over. He almost shouted "Kim!", but she was gone before he could open his mouth, and she wouldn't have heard anyway, two hundred yards away across the open sea.. Plus, he realised, he didn't exactly look or sound like Ron right now.

He ran to the ship's rail, looking for some sign of his girlfriend, but there was none. Had he imagined it was her? He didn't think so. But what was she doing here?

Silly question; it was a martial arts tournament. Lo Pin had been inviting great martial artists from all over the world. Kim certainly qualified.

But was she on a mission of her own? Had Wade sent her to help him?

He had no idea. If he approached her without knowing what the situation was, he might risk his own mission and hers if she had one. And if she was here to help him, Wade would surely have warned her what he now looked like, so it would be best to let her approach him. Otherwise, if he approached her and said 'Hi, it's Ron', she would probably think he was a lunatic!

No, he would leave it, at least until he knew what was going on. Perhaps Sensei would visit him in his dreams tonight and he could ask him? He could also perhaps talk to him about what had happened in Hong Kong, as well! It would be wonderful to spend some time with Kim again, but not at the expense of blowing two missions and bringing the wrath of Lo Pin down on their heads.

Ron sighed and headed back to the spare length of rope that he had earlier borrowed from the crew and strung up to beat the dust out of his soiled shinobi shozeki; it would make an ideal washing line to dry the soaking garment on...

oOo

"Raise attack in 3… 2… 1… Mark!", ordered Captain Domenchskeva, speaking quietly in English with a heavy Russian accent.

The attack periscope slid smoothly up from its well in the deck of the control room, and the Captain grabbed the training handles and knocked them flat as soon as it was clear of its housing, crouching down to get his eyes against the eyepiece before the head of the small periscope broke surface above him. He took a quick glance at the four junks off the port beam, before spinning through 360 degrees, just to check that they had the rest of the ocean to themselves, and then returned to the four junks. "Target 1 bearing… THAT!", he said, clicking the trigger on the right hand training handle, adding "Range… thirteen fifty metres". Then, moving slightly to his left, he continued "Target 4 bearing… THAT! Range… eleven hundred metres. Down periscope!".

The attack periscope swished back down into its well, Captain Domenchskeva slapping the training handles back up flush with the body of the optics as it plummeted.

"Depth five zero metres. Navigation, plot parallel course and steer that. Make revolutions for… 6 knots. Next observation in five minutes!", he ordered, and then headed to the electronic chart table to examine the plots that the navigator was even now making on his touch screen at the far end of the control room.

It wasn't quite the good old days, playing cat and mouse with NATO warships on exercise in the unforgiving North Atlantic, but it felt good to be a Submarine Captain again, instead of the glorified caretaker of an underwater command post.

He had Captained Global Justice 227 in its previous life as well. Well, one of its previous lives. Moving from command of an alpha-class diesel-electric hunter-killer to commanding a brand new Акула Class nuclear powered boomer, known to NATO as 'Typhoon', the largest submarine ever built and pride of the Soviet Navy had been a huge promotion, and a massive vote of confidence in his command ability.

The TK-210 as she was then known carried 20 massive SSN-20 SLBM missiles, and represented the ultimate threat of nuclear retaliation against a first strike by the capitalist running dog imperialists of America and her allies. After a couple of years she acquired a name to go with her uninspiring number; the Sebastopol. With two nuclear reactors, twin internal pressure hulls, a crew of 180 and such refinements as an on board Sauna and swimming pool, the Sebastopol and her sister ships represented the ultimate expression of Soviet submarine technology.

And then one day it seemed that everything had changed all at once. They had vanished beneath the arctic pack ice as the pride of the Soviet Navy on a war patrol, and returned to port, to the surface and to news broadcasts three months later to discover that they were now part of the navy of the Russian Federation. Soon the vessel was stripped of it's nuclear arsenal, a consequence of the START treaty, and then even the missile silos were removed as she went into dry dock to be converted into an underwater cargo carrier. A ship without a purpose, it seemed; what use was a giant submarine with a 15,000 tonne cargo capacity anyway?

Captain Domenchskeva commanded her on what he was sure would be her last ever mission as a Russian naval vessel, a short surface cruise to tie up alongside other redundant Russian submarines and warships in a decaying naval base in Severodvinsk. And then he had been a civilian again, working as first officer on a Liberian flagged bulk carrier to keep the wolf from the door as he imagined his once proud command rusting slowly away in forgotten ignominy. Or turned into dog-food tins.

In fact, by some sequence of events he had still not managed to get to the bottom of, his old ship hadn't stayed tied up for long at all. She had passed through several pairs of hands, and 5 years later the Sebastopol had been captured in mid Atlantic by a Global Justice sting operation, as it loaded 12,000 tonnes of ultra-persistent hallucinogenic love drugs from a freighter also owned by the same supervillain, Professor Theramin, whose warped plan to doctor the waters of the Amazon basin and cause the worlds largest acid trip come orgy to 'foster peace and love on a continent wide basis' was safely derailed by Agent Du and the Global Justice Kinetic Operations Squad. But not before the mad professor had consumed a kilo of his own cargo, apparently. Before he began tripping wildly, he explained that it would make his impending imprisonment much more fun. Rumour was that he was still, some years later, very much enjoying his long term incarceration in a global justice detention facility; something about the way the walls kept melting.

However it had come to pass, thanks to the Concordat, the old Sebastopol had now become the property of Global Justice, and they had immediately seen her potential. Six months later, Global Justice had advertised for an experienced submarine captain and submariners to crew their new underwater command vessel, and a desperately keen Mr Domenchskeva had his job application in the post within 24 hours. Eighteen months later, after an exhaustive bare-metal refit, he had his beloved ship back.

But some things were definitely different.

His 'new' and smaller crew consisted mainly of cold war peace dividend cast-off nuclear submariners from Britain, France, America and the former Soviet navy, with a few new recruits to leaven the distinctly late-middle-aged vibe on board, and while the heavy engineering was still just the same as it always was, his ship was almost unrecognisable internally; gone were all the reassuringly solid, tactile, push-button Soviet navigation, sensor and weapon systems, in favour of cutting edge technology that left his control room looking more like the command deck of a futuristic starship than the control room of a cold war boomer. He had had to fight tooth and nail to even retain the periscopes; how could it be a proper submarine without periscopes? That giant cargo bay, once home to enough destructive power to devastate the entire eastern seaboard of the United States, was now a hover-ship hangar, and the former missile fire control compartment contained a command and control centre from which Global Justice bigwigs could run dozens of simultaneous operations across an entire theatre.

The other difference, of course, was that everybody on board was being paid an absolute fortune, and apart from Captain Domenchskeva who chose to live aboard, were only at sea for three months in every nine. They also enjoyed an off-duty lifestyle while aboard that had more in common with that experienced by passengers on a cruise liner than crew on an operational submarine. Individual cabins for the crew? A solarium? An a la carte restaurant? A briefing room that doubled as a cinema? Unbelievable!

Most of the time, from one year to the next, Global Justice 227 pootled around aimlessly at periscope depth in empty oceans with its communications arrays poking above the surface, operating as a glorified underwater headquarters complex, so those vanishingly rare occasions when all the crusty old cold war warriors crewing the Sevastopol actually had a chance to play at being proper submariners again were much prized by everybody. Even though a few of them had worked out that at various points in the past they had actually been hunting each other during 'the good old days'!

They had picked up the junks as they had motored out of the deep channel into Victoria harbour, and after a quick periscope observation, which had confirmed the identification and even allowed Captain Domenchskeva to identify Kim Possible sitting on deck on the rearmost junk in the flotilla, Target 4, they had shadowed the vessels using the hydrophones alone, keeping their distance. When the junks had cut their engines, and hoisted their sails, Captain Domenchskeva had called for silent routine, in case the junks had hydrophones of their own, and they had been creeping along as quietly as possible ever since, tracking the now almost silent sailing vessels visually, ensuring that they always kept eyes on the junk carrying Miss Possible.

Mind you, Captain Domenchskeva reflected, at this rate it would take Lo Pin's junks two days to reach his island, and two days of silent routine and visual observations every five minutes was perhaps a little too much nostalgia for the re-tread cold warriors on the crew! No flushing the heads, no hot food from the galley, no entertainment and no sleep for two days were not appealing prospects. At least they would feel like they had earned their salaries this month!

He glanced at the countdown timer on the navigation display; it was almost time for the next observation, he realised.

"Come to Periscope depth!", he ordered, quietly.

It was going to be a long night.

oOo

Shego tapped confidently on the door of Lo Pin's cabin, half expecting there to be no answer. Instead, the entryphone spoke; "Ah, White Ninja… do come in!".

Shego noted the well concealed camera, as the door lock buzzed and the door swung open.

Shego walked inside, and the door closed behind her. Ahead of her, the tail end of a glorious sunset filled the giant picture windows in the stern of Lo Pin's junk, and Lo Pin said "One moment, Shego…".

The blinds again snapped closed, and this time, when the lights came on, Shego was still standing where she had been when they went out, although admittedly her hands had moved reflexively to the grips of the Sai Swords that were tucked into the belt she was wearing around her shinobi shozeki, but she quickly moved them upwards and peeled her hood back, before walking towards the settee she had sat on earlier.

"Please sit down, Shego. Is everything to your satisfaction?", asked Lo Pin.

"Yes, thank you…", said Shego with uncharacteristic politeness.

"Perhaps that drink now?", asked Lo Pin.

"Bourbon, neat, on the rocks. Make it a large one!", grinned Shego.

A minute later, Lo Pin was handing her a large clinking glass of whisky that he had poured himself from a small cocktail cabinet that had emerged from the wall of the stateroom at the push of a button, and then he sat back and sipped a rather smaller single malt Scotch of his own.

"What can I do for you, Shego?".

"Well, since I am your guest, I suspect it would be considered... rude to wait until you had gone to bed, then break in to your cabin and hack into your computer network in order to find out what I want to know. So I thought it would be more polite to just come and ask you.", said Shego, sweetly, as she swilled the bourbon around the glass and then took a decent swig.

Lo Pin raised an eyebrow momentarily and then laughed aloud. "I suspect you might find your first suggestion more difficult than you expect. But that isn't a challenge, Shego. Ask away!".

"Thank you. I wanted to ask you about one of my fellow competitors. He's travelling on the next ship in the flotilla. Large man, very well built indeed, dressed in black. Who is he?", asked Shego, simply.

"I'm sure you wouldn't want me sharing your information with any other of my guests, Shego. I have assured you of your confidentiality, and I'm not sure that I should be breaching the confidences of another competitor…", said Lo Pin, cautiously.

"If he _has_ any confidences that you feel you need to preserve, that would probably tell me all I need to know...", said Shego; if the guy had secrets then that would immediately rule him out of consideration as a candidate for any nocturnal aerobics on the island. Lack of secrets didn't rule him in, of course, but at least it meant Shego could make an informed decision.

"What is your interest in this man?", asked Lo Pin?

"Purely personal. Very personal…", said Shego, with a slightly feral grin.

"Ah… I think I may know who you mean. Apparently, he has made quite an impression on the Navigation Officer on board his vessel. Wait a moment…"

There was a brief pause as Shego saw an iris scanning laser shine into Lo Pin's eye, and then a practiced tapping of keys, followed by a pause as Lo Pin apparently read the man's file.

Lo Pin grinned, and then rotated the screen to face Shego and said "There is nothing here that is confidential…".

Shego read the short report, which stated that no record of anybody with Saru Chounouryoku's DNA, fingerprints or facial features had ever been captured or recorded in any computer database, or logged on any digitally recorded CCTV camera, anywhere in the world, ever. A note explained that the findings of their in depth research supported and confirmed a cable from the Sensei of the Yamanouchi school asking them to take care of and assist the competitor they were entering into the tournament because he had never previously set foot outside the walled compound of the Yamanouchi school.

"Well would you look at that…", said Shego under her breath. Not only was he vanishingly unlikely to have the faintest idea who Shego was, knowing the ascetic and decidedly asexual life of the average warrior monk, he had probably never even seen _any_ woman naked before! Provided he wasn't gay or anything, and provided she played this… and him… correctly, taught him exactly what to do and how and when to do it, Shego could very definitely blow the cobwebs right out with this hunk of prime himbo. Cobwebs. Right out! Blow! BOOM!

She realised that Lo Pin was smirking, and that her face was probably rather more revealing of her intentions than she would have hoped, so she forced her features into a deadpan expression and turned the flat screen monitor back to face Lo Pin. "Thank you", she said in as business-like a fashion as she could muster.

"My pleasure. Now, may I ask something in return?", asked Lo Pin.

"You can certainly ask…", said Shego, retaining the deadpan expression.

"Your DNA, Shego. We scanned it remotely when you signed in, along with your fingerprints. The prints are on file, in fact on rather a lot of files, dating back many years, but the DNA… "; he trailed off.

Shego smirked. "It's apparently not human, and every time it has been tested, the results have come back saying it is different, often a different species or no living species at all?"

"Yes… how do you do that?", asked Lo Pin, sounding both curious and impressed.

"It's easy. Just get hit by a comet from outer space. Before you know it, your DNA will be uniquely and randomly mutating every seven seconds for the rest of your life. Sometimes I'm surprised I don't have two heads and a hump on my back. Once upon a time the Belgian police actually spent several months looking for an unidentified burglar who they believed had used a trained penguin to help them turn over a bank vault."

Lo Pin grinned.

"My turn…", said Shego. "Final question for now. What little I have found out about your... business operation… includes the fact that since you took over from your father, in such tragic circumstances, you've changed your modus operandi somewhat. Why?".

Lo Pin looked surprised, and pursed his lips for a moment.

"A better question is why do I do what I do at all. But the answer to both questions is the more or less the same. There are some parts of my father's legacy with which I was... uncomfortable. So I changed them. And we must all make our own way in the world as best we can, true to ourselves. But in the final analysis, we are all prisoners of the legacy of our upbringing, Shego… and this was my destiny…"

'We are all prisoners of the legacy of our upbringing… ain't that the truth!', thought Shego, bitterly.

She raised her glass to Lo Pin, in semi-salute, and took another swig of her bourbon.

She wasn't quite as sure about the destiny part, though. Partly because the person always most concerned with telling her what her destiny was had always been Hego, and he couldn't have been less right, and partly because she was pretty sure she didn't believe in destiny at all.

oOo

Mike Jones pushed the pile of empty pizza boxes to one side to make more room on his bench, and reached for his notes. "Yeah, I made that 211 mph between one thousand feet and sea level, based on prevailing atmospheric pressure and air temperature around the crash site…", he said, looking across at an unkempt and exhausted looking "Digger" Hawk, who was tapping numbers into his shiny new computer model.

It was the end of a long night in the lab, and this was the culmination of their joint efforts. They had proved, to their mutual amazement, quite early on once 'Digger' had modelled the effect of Shego's plasma versus the waters of the Atlantic ocean, that given the right combination of plasma temperature and impact speed, Shego could have survived her plummet into the sea. They had proved further that having survived entry to the water, Shego could just about have made it back to the surface alive, based on evidence on her Global Justice file of her lung capacity and physical endurance. This had validated the basic premise of Mike's bizarre hunch.

But then just when they thought they were going to have to take disturbing news to Dr Director, a statistical analysis of different combinations of entry speed and plasma temperature had highlighted the fact that Shego's chances of getting the combination of speed and temperature right by even intelligent guesstimation was approximately one point seven million to one against. Put another way, statistically speaking she had more chance of having her fall broken by a flock of passing flying seagulls than she did of surviving hitting the sea using her plasma powers. As long as her survival depended on her unpracticed judgement and control of her speed versus the temperature of hands on entry as she plummeted towards the ocean, this was not a viable survival strategy.

Of course, in order to complete the analysis, they had to look for any data points that might negate the randomising effect of Shego attempting to select a speed and a temperature herself. For that, they first needed to more precisely model the water and air temperatures and densities at the crash site and factor those into their calculations in order to work out exactly what the correct speeds and temperature actually were. As Dr Hawk had burnt the midnight oil, refining his computer model and developing a whole new sub-branch of mathematics, Mike had been diligently modelling ocean currents at the time of and immediately after the crash, and then factoring in Shego's maximum possible swimming speed.

He had only managed to identify one remotely possible approximate landfall. The Cape Verde islands. Not that it would matter if Shego couldn't have survived the fall.

Finally, 'Digger' had finished his computer model, and Mike had given him the results of his own calculations; what would Shego's sink rate be in a standard stable sky-diving free fall position, naked (the CIA sponsored search operation had recovered Shego's polyester boiler suit from the sea two days earlier, although the CIA themselves had yet to recognise the significance of the find, and Mike had already determined that it had been ripped from her body in mid air) and Dr Hawk had plugged the numbers into the model; the verdict had been unequivocal - at Shego's maximum instantaneous plasma temperature, based on analysis of the video from the Uzbek torture dungeon, and thus using a temperature far higher than Global Justice's previous estimate of her capabilities, she would be far too hot to survive hitting the sea.

There was one final check to do; if she had chosen for some reason to hit the water at terminal velocity, as fast as she could in other words, and heated her hands as hot as she could, then that would not be a randomly chosen combination of speed and temperature, and thus would be significantly more likely, despite still being a very unlikely set of circumstances indeed. If that combination _was_ a survivable impact, Shego's odds of surviving the initial fall from the plane would have risen from 'statistically nil' to 'slight'.

"Ok, here goes nothing, mate! And then I'm going to bed to sleep for a week…", said Callum Hawk, hitting the Return key triumphantly.

A few seconds later, there was a loud 'Ding!' from Callum Hawk's PC, and his jaw dropped open as he slumped back into the chair he was already half way out of.

"Fuck me, Mike!", he said with some amazement.

"That combination is in the sweet spot?", asked Mike in some consternation.

"Bang in the middle of it, mate. If she lit up as hot as she can, and if she hit the water absolutely flat out, arms first, and if she had then played her cards _just_ right, then according to this she would have survived. Although even for Shego, working a plan like that out as she fell towards certain death would be… unlikely. But still, she actually might have made it into the sea alive! Fucking hell…", emoted a shocked sounding "Digger" Hawk.

"Right then… I'd better start a trawl of any satellite imagery I can lay my hands on for the Cape Verde islands…", said Mike, rubbing his hands and reaching for his keyboard.

"NO!", Dr Hawk almost shouted.

"What? Why not? We have Gold Priority Clearance, remember…", said Mike, looking puzzled.

"Because the NSA has its beady eyes trained all over Global Justice. And if we start looking at satellite imagery of the Cape Verde islands, then the next thing will be that the CIA will know that we know something that they don't. and they'll be looking at the same imagery we are looking at ten minutes later. Which isn't a problem if there is nothing there to find. But if there _is_ something there to find, then we need to find it, and Dr Director absolutely won't want the CIA to find it!", explained 'Digger'.

"So… is there anything we can do?", asked Mike with a pained expression.

"Only one thing I can think of, but Dr Director is really not going to like it, mate. Still… needs must! She'll be at her desk in half an hour, we can talk it through with her then. In the meantime, I'm going to grab a quick shower and some breakfast; I smell like a possum's nut-sack and without a very strong coffee, I may fall asleep across her desk. I guess you wouldn't say no to the same thing, either!",

'Bloody hell…', thought Mike. 'How close did I just get to getting myself fired before I've even got my feet under the table?'

"Thanks!", he said, and it was heartfelt. "I guess all this cloak and dagger stuff doesn't come naturally…".

"Don't sweat it, kid. You've done some _great_ work here. If you hadn't flown this kite in the first place, and if Shego _is_ out there, then the CIA would probably be finding out that she had survived _before_ we did. And definitely not in a good way. So, shower, coffee, a bacon butty, and then back here in twenty to pull together a slide pack to take to the boss lady. OK?", said Digger, reassuringly. "And I'm out of here…", he said, heading for the door.

Mike Jones was only two paces behind him.

oOo

Kim placed the empty bowl down on the coffee table in her cabin, and licked her lips appreciatively. Her food had arrived within 20 minutes of her ordering it, and had been _well_ worth waiting for! This mission was getting better and better! She drained the soda can and dropped it into the metal waste can, tossing the disposable chopsticks in alongside it and then sat back in the comfortable armchair and wondered at the darkness outside the portholes in her cabin; in these latitudes, the transition between daylight and darkness really was almost like somebody turning out the lights.

And then she heard the sound of the junk's engine firing up again. 'I wonder why they are starting the engine?', she thought, curious. If the wind had dropped, she would have felt the movement of the ship change as it was becalmed, and it was still ploughing along at five or six knots, give or take, under sail.

The answer to her question was not long in coming and _very_ much surprised her.

As she listened to the whine of the engine or engines get louder and more high pitched than it had in the confines of Victoria harbour, she was just wondering why on earth a sailing junk would have what sounded like jet power, when there was a continuous whir of electric winches above her cabin; since all the sails had been up when she had been on deck, Kim deduced that the canvas was coming down. All of it, judging by the number of whirring winches she could hear. All the way down, judging by the length of time they whirred for . But she was also distracted by a vibration beneath her feet, and the sound of big hydraulic rams operating.

This was just the moment when she would normally whip out her Kimunicator and ask Wade what the sitch was. Instead, she jumped up from her armchair and ran to her porthole to look outside. She couldn't see what heavy machinery was making the noise she could hear on the junk she was aboard, but a quick look at the closest junk, which was dimly illuminated by a half moon, showed that something big was now dragging in the water both near the bow and near the stern.

And then, as the winches stopped, the mystery was solved; the whine of the turbines rose to a crescendo, the junk picked up speed, while the ship alongside kept pace with it, until suddenly its keel rose out of the water and it was travelling with only two braced hydraulically deployed hydrofoils in contact with the water, and with the rest of the massive ship a good seven or eight feet clear of the sea's surface! And still the four now low-flying junks continued to accelerate, in close formation!

She had idly wondered how long the tournament could possibly last if it was going to take them the better part of two days or more each way to get to and back from Lo Pin's island, based on her memory of the map she had seen in Dr Director's briefing. Now she realised they might be on Lo Pin's island within a couple of hours, so fast were they moving.

It also occurred to her that it was probably no coincidence that they had waited until they were out of range of coastal radar and other shipping before suddenly converting from luxury sailing vessels into high speed high tech hydrofoils.

Still, no matter, the more tournament time, the better from her point of view…

She headed back to her armchair, enjoying the different feel of the boat now that it was 'flying' above the waves, and reached over to pull her English exercise book and a pen out of her open suitcase. She had an inkling that her 'What I did on my summer vacation' essay might be marked down for 'containing elements of fantasy rather than being grounded in reality', or whatever Mr Barkin would sarcastically scrawl in the margins when she described events so far (or a sanitised and unclassified, edited version of them at least), but really, she wanted to remember this 'mission', and without the Kimunicator to take snapshots for her mission log or just for her personal scrapbook, a picture in words was the only kind she would have when she got home!

She began writing, slowly at first and then with increasing speed and confidence...

oOo

"Chyort voz'mi", Captain Domenchskeva muttered to himself as he looked at the rapidly receding sterns of the four Chinese sailing junks he had been tailing. The Hydrophone operators had already reported them moving away at increasing speed, the visual observations confirmed it.

"Secure from silent running. All ahead full!", ordered Captain Domenchskeva, slightly desperately, as he stared through the image-intensified viewing port on the larger 'Search' periscope. But it was no good. The four junks had suddenly accelerated from five knots to between fifty and sixty knots and were vanishing towards the horizon. If he redlined both the reactors, and ran in the warmest, least dense layer of water he could find , he might be able to coax an over-speed 30 knots out of the old girl at war emergency power. For a while. Until one of the steam turbines blew up and probably killed somebody, and then they would be limping to the nearest super-tanker sized dry dock for repairs at 12 knots. In the meantime he had 'lost' Kim Possible. Dr Director would be pleased.

Not.

He was about to drop the periscope, go deep and try to head for Lo Pin's island at best sustainable speed, while he encoded a message reporting this unexpected turn of events back to HQ, when something caught his eye, fluttering in the breeze between his periscope and the rapidly receding junks. He centred the crosshairs on it and turned the 'increase magnification' ring on the left hand training handle three full clicks. The image intensification system caused the eyepiece to flare green for a moment while it adjusted to the altered optics, and then the image stabilised. Just as the black one piece garment of some kind that had obviously been tossed about in the air by the turbulent vortices behind the giant junk- come-hydrofoils, had succumbed to gravity and fallen into the sea.

He realised that he remembered a guy coming up onto the deck of Target 2 and hanging a very similar looking garment over an improvised clothes line, during one of his observations, and grinned to himself. Presumably he hadn't expected the junks to suddenly rear up out of the water and turn into high speed jetfoils either!

'It looks like at least I'm not the only person round here whose day just got ruined by this crock of shit!', he thought, chuckling grimly to himself.

Then he barked "Make depth nine zero metres. Steer zero niner four, all ahead full. Engineering, watch those temperatures and pressures and keep it in in the green, reduce speed if you need to, I'd rather be there ten minutes later than blow up on the way. Number one, you have the con, I'll be in my cabin.".

The gaunt, steel-eyed and grey haired American ex Polaris boat skipper who was currently his deputy on the Sebastopol, and would be for another month until the end of his three month shift when _another_ hugely experienced ex cold-war nuclear submarine captain would replace him for three months, said "Aye aye, Captain, I have the con..." as he moved into Domenchskeva's usual spot between the chart table and the periscope platform, and his boss headed for his quarters.

No wonder he preferred to live aboard, he had often mused while laying in bed comparing the modern, comfortable, well equipped and spacious and well lit cabin, built in the space once occupied by both the Captain's cabin and the Political Commissar's cabin in the 'good old days', with his damp depressing little apartment back home in a Moscow suburb. But now he was writing a flash message to HQ in Middleton, USA to report that the junks had at least temporarily gotten away from them, and he was hoping nobody in the underground complex would blame him for the fact that a submarine wasn't as fast as a hydrofoil. If Global Justice had known that the junks he had been tasked to follow were capable of 60 knots, they would surely have sent a couple of stealth hover ships up to tail them instead. Can you say 'intelligence failure'?

Still, it was only a small glitch; they would catch up with Kim Possible at Lo Pin's island tomorrow and then continue to stand by as ordered.

But what was worrying Captain Domenchskeva wasn't so much what had already gone wrong; it was more 'If we didn't know about that, what the hell else don't we know about?'.


	26. Directors Discomfited

Directors Discomfited

Director Mackenzie sat white faced in his chair at the back of Secure Briefing Room 7, deep beneath the CIA New Headquarters Building, as the lights came up. There were less people in the room now than there had been when the video they had just watched had begun to play on the large screen, and it had been a select gathering to begin with.

After about twenty seconds, he spoke, a slight tremor in his voice.

"Where did we get this?", he asked.

"It was left in one of the Agency dead drops in Istanbul. There are no forensics, and we cannot identify the source. ", said the Deputy Director, European Operations.

At that moment, the Assistant Director, Internal Security, returned to the briefing room, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief. "Sorry about that, Mr Director - something I ate for breakfast must have disagreed with me…", he said, apologetically.

Ignoring him for the moment, Director McKenzie continued "Shall I assume that the other domestic agencies not on Global Justices' shit list will already have seen this? In which case why didn't we get this from a domestic source?", he asked, testily.

"I'm told that Senate Intelligence Committee has explicitly read the riot act to the FBI at least about the consequences of further breaches of the Concordat, Mr Director. Nobody is sharing anything Concordat related with us - word is that people are staring down the barrel of life in prison for treason if anything from Global Justice finds its way to us from a domestic source...", explained the Deputy Director, Congressional Relations, apologetically.

"Whose side are they on?", exploded Director Mackenzie?

"I think they feel, however misguidedly, that they are acting in the national interest, Mr Director…", replied the Deputy Director, Congressional Relations, evenly.

"I am not going to apologise for neutralising a threat of THAT magnitude! Hopefully that video will clearly make the case to anybody who doubted it that Shego was an existential threat to the Unites States of America and that we were right to attempt to render her!", asserted the Director, testily, adding as an afterthought, "...and have we found the body yet?"

"No, Mr Director", said the Deputy Director, Africa. "The search continues, but the heat from the Pentagon is… becoming uncomfortable. There is now an imminent danger that they may go over our heads and appeal directly to the Commander in Chief if we don't release the resources we have sequestered. In any case, I don't think that there is much to be gained from further operations at the scene of the incident. We have recovered approximately 93% of the structure of the plane from the deep ocean, and our analysis is that if a body has been floating free in those waters for a week, our chances of recovering it now is effectively nil."

"Goddam it…", exclaimed the Director, angrily. The after a few moments, he said "OK, give the Pentagon most of their toys back. But I want the wreckage recovered to the US for further and continuing analysis. And give the NSA the nod that they are now running point on this, and we need to be ready to get boots on the ground to verify at a moments notice. If Shego's body or any part of it washes up _anywhere_, I want to know about it. And if those smug pricks at Global Justice find anything, I want to know as soon as they do if not before!"

"Actually, this video presents another difficulty…", said the Deputy Director, Congressional Relations. "I foresee some potential blowback concerning the… moral aspects... of our partnership with Uzbek Intelligence".

"Don't these people realise what is at stake here? Damn bleeding heart liberal milksops! You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. Do I need to remind them how many hardened terrorists have only confessed to their crimes against us after our Uzbek allies have interrogated them on our behalf? We're protecting America here, not running a goddamn ACLU sponsored debating society! Ask them how many dead constituents abandoning intelligence co-operation and jointly sponsored interrogation with important allies like these is worth to them!", ranted the Director testily.

"Mr Director, politicians knowing that unpleasant but necessary things are being done in their name is one thing, but I fear that actually watching people being skinned alive by interrogators who obviously enjoy their work and to whom we regularly send suspects for interrogation is going to lead to an uncomfortable session for you and the Agency the next time you appear before them.", explained the Deputy Director, Congressional Relations.

"I'll just have to stare them down, then! OK, thank you gentlemen, that is all! Err...except you, Mr Assistant Director. Please stay a moment…" .

Those present picked up their papers and shuffled out of the lecture theatre wordlessly, until only Director Mackenzie and the Assistant Director, Internal Security remained in the room.

As soon as the door closed, Director Mackenzie turned to the other man, who was still looking slightly green, and said "In the light of the fact that we haven't found Shego's body yet, and of what we saw on that video, I'd just like to review my personal security arrangements and my protection detail with you, if you don't mind…."

oOo

"So...", said Mike Jones to a rapt Dr Director, "the bottom line is, we have identified a _very _small chance that Shego may have survived the fall from the plane."

"How is that possible?", asked Dr Director.

"Well...", said Dr Hawk, clicking on the remote control to bring up the first slide, a picture of a stick figure diving towards a blue ocean; "Hitting the sea at between a hundred and thirty miles per hour, and two hundred miles an hour or so, has much the same effect on the human body as hitting concrete. However, Mike had an off the wall idea, as you can see; he asked himself what would happen if Shego used her plasma to boil a hole in the ocean at the point of impact. And it turns out he was on to something..."

A picture of the stick figure, complete with glowing green hands entering a hole in the blue sea, wreathed in whisps of artistic steam appeared on Dr Director's giant screen.

"However, upon analysis we determined that the chances of her getting it wrong were significantly greater than the chances of her getting it right. If she didn't light up hot enough, then she would hit still very solid hot water at un-survivable speed, just as if she hadn't lit up at all. And if she lit up too hot for her speed, then..."

A picture of a lobster in a pot on a hot stove appeared on the screen.

"Ouch...", said Dr Director.

"Yes, and if Shego did boil herself alive, that might explain the lack of a body. You might expect to find some skeletal remains distributed across the sea bed here, but the flesh would have disintegrated; we calculate that the bones would be distributed over a one mile radius on the sea bed, which is approximately a mile and a half below the surface over the possible impact area. We calculated that the chance of Shego correctly guessing the correct combination of temperature and impact speed for survival was effectively nil, but we also determined that if she hit the water at terminal velocity, meaning absolutely flat out, and with her hands lit at full instantaneous power, then she would have survived water entry.

"Then she would have needed to immediately begin to steer herself away from the vertical. If she hadn't done that, she would have impacted the sea-bed at two hundred miles an hour. If she was too conservative with her attempts to change direction, she would have either fatally impacted the seabed travelling more slowly and at a shallower angle, or at best run out of air and drowned before she made it back to the surface. If she had tried to change direction too aggressively then she would have suffered catastrophic injuries and probably rendered herself unconscious, extinguishing her plasma and stopping suddenly in the water from two hundred miles per hour; again fatal. However..."

A short animation appeared, showing the stick figure entering the sea through a hole, travelling in a bubble of steam in a looping arc back towards the surface, then the bubble collapsing and the stick figure swimming up to the surface.

"And the likelihood that this scenario played out to a successful conclusion?", asked Dr Director, apprehensively.

"Well, if she didn't hit the water at full speed, with her hands above her head at full power... nil. If she did? Well, the odds of reaching the surface alive and capable of treading water when she got there... somewhere between 5% and 15%. But obviously, the cumulative odds are significantly lower than that. And that would only put her naked and carrying unknown injuries, on her own in the water in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. And then she would have to attempt to reach safety. Which would be extremely difficult. However, if she did get this far, it could provide another explanation for why her body wasn't found by the extensive CIA search operation.", concluded 'Digger'.

"So, assuming for a moment that this scenario did occur, and Shego did survive the fall, what would her options have been?", asked Dr Director, calmly; she was still telling herself that she had nothing to worry about, and she almost had herself convinced; the number of stars that would have had to align for Shego to have got this far alive rendered this almost an academic exercise in crossing the 't's and dotting the 'i's.

"Mike, over to you...", said Dr Hawk.

"Right...", said Mike, confidently, nodding to Dr Hawk, who pushed the button on the remote to display the next slide for him.

A map of the Atlantic ocean, centred on the crash site, appeared, with an asymmetric shaded area superimposed.

"Factoring in what we know about Shego's strength and endurance, not allowing for any injuries she may have suffered in the fall, and making some reasonable assumptions about her optimal swimming speed in open water, then factoring in known ocean currents and sea conditions at the time of the incident, this is the maximum possible radius she could expect to swim before exhaustion overtook her, and we can assume that she would have drowned. We know that she didn't find a piece of flotsam to cling to, for two reasons; firstly she would have been found by now by one of the search teams searching for her body, secondly the NSA moved a geostationary satellite over the crash site 28 hours after the incident and have had a supercomputer looking for anything green in the water within 500 miles of the shoot down site ever since. In any case, apart from a short rain storm a few hours after the crash, there has been no precipitation within that zone since the incident, and so if Shego had been bobbing around out there for days, without potable water she would be dead by now anyway.

"So, to survive she would have needed to swim to safety, and the only landfall remotely within range is on the Cape Verde islands. There were four vessels that passed through the shaded area and that Shego could have been picked up by, but she would have needed to swim in a direction that she would have known offered no chance of survival other than being picked up by a passing ship, and the odds of her managing to fortuitously rendezvous with one of those four ships in quarter of a million square miles of ocean are too small to even calculate. And note that I said meet, being seen in the water and picked up by one of those ships would be even less likely, not to mention that they would have reported picking up a lone swimmer in mid ocean, and getting aboard a large vessel moving at cruising speed on the high seas undetected would be effectively impossible. In any case, all four vessels have been covertly inspected by the CIA, and nothing was found. We can effectively discount them.

"All of which leads to one conclusion; in the vanishingly unlikely circumstance that she survived, she would have had to swim for the better part of 24 hours straight to make landfall somewhere in the Cape Verde chain. If she missed the islands by even a mile to the North or South then the currents would pick her up and drag her up or down the coast of Africa, and would either still be out there somewhere, or have already ended up in the belly of a shark. The timing, by the way, is crucial. If she didn't make it within 24 hours or so, then she wouldn't have made it at all. So, all we need to do is find some way of proving that she didn't make landfall on Cape Verde the day after the incident, and we can pretty much wrap this up. Even if there was another survival vector for Shego from the initial fall that we have failed to identify, that part of our analysis will still hold good. But there is a problem with that...", said Mike, tailing off apologetically.

"You don't want the CIA to discover that we are poking around on the Cape Verde chain, and you need me to ask Mr Load to poke around on our behalf without tipping off the NSA?", asked Dr Director, the eyebrow above her good eye raised slightly and her tone betraying a slight frost.

"Err... yes, something like that...", said Mike Jones apologetically.

At that moment the map on the giant screen was replaced by Wade Load's young face. "Hi...", he said matter of factly. "You wanted to ask me something?".

Dr Director frowned and said "Mr Load, I do very much wish you wouldn't do that!".

"Sorry!", said Wade breezily, and obviously not at all chastened. "But I may be able to help you out."

"I gather you were listening in to our conversation?", asked Dr Director, distinct irritation colouring her voice.

"Umm... I just popped in to ask you when Kim was going to arrive on the island. I thought it would be rude to interrupt, though. But Dr Hawk, I had a quick look at your code while I was waiting. It's very impressive work. If you don't mind, while you were talking I had a little look at optimising the main thermal energy absorption calculation, it looked like it might be a bit of a bottleneck. It should run about eight times faster now. Feel free to use my version if you like...".

"Err... thank you... I think...", said Dr Hawk. "Now, do you have any ideas as to how we might...",

"I'm already on it", said Wade matter of factly, as the sound of two keyboards clattering in rapid stereo could be heard in the background. "And... I've pulled in some satellite images from a civilian survey satellite that passed over the Cape Verde islands on the afternoon of the day after the plane went down. And the Global Turtle Project has a tool I wrote for them that they are using to survey global Sea Turtle breeding activity by analysing satellite imagery to identify and count the impressions made in beach sand by females coming ashore to lay eggs. But if I amend the... pattern... recognition... routine... to... look for Shego's... footprints... instead of turtle drag marks, using... data from... the Global Justice profile, then... done. Hang on..."

The screen changed to show a fast moving sequence of satellite images of the coastline and beaches of the Cape Verde chain, with a counter superimposed. After about 30 seconds, a dialogue box appeared, containing the text "Sequence complete. Zero turtle egg laying events detected!".

"Well, I think that wraps it up...", said Dr Hawk. "After 24 hours of swimming, I don't see Shego scaling sheer volcanic cliffs, so if she didn't come ashore on a beach...".

"Wait...", said Wade, as more keyboard sounds rattled through the loudspeaker, "I just need to add in Shego's forearm dimensions, torso length, thigh and lower leg length. If she didn't walk out of the sea, she might have crawled... and... there we go".

The rapidly changing sequence of satellite images once again cycled across the big screen, and once again the counter sat resolutely at zero. And then on the last image, there was a loud "Ding!", the counter moved to '1' and the dialogue box that appeared reported "Sequence complete. One turtle egg laying event detected!".

"Holy crap...", said Mike Jones, in stunned astonishment.

Dr Director sat bolt upright as if she had just been electrocuted. "Mr Load, please tell me that is a glitch...", she asked anxiously.

"Well... it's a single trace, and that means I'm only 47.3% confident in the accuracy of the result. And bodily dimensions are not unique identifying features, although that precise combination is statistically extremely rare, so it could be somebody else crawling up the beach after a swim. Also, it goes from the sea and up the beach under the lighthouse on Ilha de Santo Antão, and it doesn't come down again. So if it was Shego, she was still there hidden under the cliffs when this satellite passed overhead. Let me run the same scanning sequence on the next pass of the satellite, 24 hours later...", said Wade.

This time the counter whirred like a demented stopwatch and the dialogue box said "Sequence complete. One hundred and Sixty-Seven turtle egg laying events detected!".

Dr Hawk gave a low whistle and said "Fuck me gently with a didgeridoo! When I told you how hard she was to kill, mate, I was just trying to gee you up a bit. That's... ".

Dr Director swallowed hard and asked "Mr Load, is this telling us what I think it is?".

"Yes, Dr Director. There is a 94.7% likelihood that Shego was on that beach, based on footprints and crawl trail evidence. And... these marks indicate she was using a crutch. Actually, comparing the two pictures I can see the piece of driftwood she cut up to make that crutch in the first picture. And... these are the offcuts she left... it looks like they have been cut using flame... so make that 100%."

"Oh no...", said Dr Director, slumping back in her chair, a look of utter horror on her face.

There was a stunned silence in Dr Director's office. Wade blinked impassively from the big screen. Several seconds passed.

Finally Dr Director took a deep breath and sat upright again, and said "This information does not leave this room for now. Not until we have a plan of action. Mr Load, tell nobody. The last thing we need is the CIA finding out she is alive and going postal on this. One thing I must do, though... I want Kim Possible back here right now, just in case..."

She pushed a button on her desk and said "Agent Simpson, I need you to send a priority flash secure signal to Global Justice 227. The signal is 'Vesuvius, Immediate, Red'. Let me know when it has been acknowledged...". 'Vesuvius' was the code word meaning 'extract Kim Possible'. 'Immediate' meant do it right now. 'Red' meant 'This is a Priority One assignment, see it through whatever the cost'.

"Dr Director, we have just received a priority coded flash _from _'227. Thirty minutes ago, the target they were tracking accelerated to approximately 60 knots and broke contact. '227 remains undetected and is making best speed to Point Lima-India to re-acquire contact. Do you still wish me to send your message?", said the disembodied voice from the desk speaker.

"Damn and blast...", said Dr Director, with feeling. "No, thank you Agent Simpson, don't send that message. Tell '227 to proceed as intended.". She hit the button again to close the line, and turned back to the screen.

"Mr Load, you said you called in to find out when Kim would be on the island. She may be there within the hour. Can you get her Kimunicator to her tonight?"

"Not tonight, Dr Director, but I can start the delivery process early tomorrow morning local time, yes. Doing it at night would be difficult and risky. Do you wish to get a message to her?"

"When she is back in contact with you, please patch me through to her immediately. I need to speak to her urgently. And please, Mr Load, let me tell her about Shego if you don't mind.". She didn't want Kim heading off on her own on some damned fool crusade to save Shego; that would complicate everything. And if Kim got between Shego and the CIA, then the consequences didn't bear thinking about.

"OK...", said Wade, frowning slightly.

"And with that, I must bid you good day for now, Mr Load. We will speak later I'm sure...", smiled Dr Director.

The ten year old super genius looked slightly alarmed and said "But I can help you find...".

He was cut off in his prime, with a loud klunk, as Dr Director hit the button to secure her office against all external eavesdropping. The emergency lights flickered into life, and Dr Director turned back to Mike Jones and Dr Hawk.

"Gentlemen, we have a serious problem. We need to find Shego, and find her quickly. And we need to do it while minimising the risk of a leak. Officially I should be tasking our analysis department to update Shego's file now and then sharing it with the membership of the Concordat, but the consequence of that would be that the CIA would know within hours if not minutes, and that would be... extremely undesirable for the Concordat and everybody else. But if members of the Concordat find out that I've been holding out on them, the best that could possibly happen is that the train wreck I was striving to prevent would happen anyway, and that I'd be fired. My first duty as Director of Global Justice is to protect the Concordat, and even if paradoxically that means breaking its most fundamental provisions, that is what I'm going to do. If we succeed, all sins will no doubt be forgiven later. So, I'm not going to share the bad news with anybody either internally or externally for now. Which means that we can't yet call on the resources of the Analysis department or anybody else. I know you are both scientists rather than intelligence analysts, I know you've gone the extra mile to do the brilliant work that has proved that Shego survived the incident, and I know that you haven't slept yet, but I'm afraid that you both also just drew the short straw; we are going to have to work out where Shego is ourselves if we can. If we need to call on Mr Load's expertise again then so be it, but I don't want to expand the circle of people who know that Shego is still out there somewhere unless I absolutely have to. You are no good to me if you can't think straight, though, so please, go and see Agent Simpson who will find you both berths on the accommodation level, and grab a couple of hours sleep. I'll see you back here in 3 hours or so, and we can start working out where the hell Shego is holed up. OK?. "

"Dr Director...", said Mike and 'Digger' in stereo.

As they stood up to leave they exchanged expressions of wide-eyed wonder, and as Dr Director hit the button to reconnect her office to the grid, they shuffled out of the door together.

Once she was alone again, Dr Director put her head in her hands and groaned in anguish.

A distant memory flitted through her mind unbidden. It seemed to come from a million years ago, and a galaxy far far away, rather than seven years ago in Go City. A memory of hot breath on her neck, of sinuously toned slick pale green flesh tightly enveloping her, of a sultry voice hoarsely whispering "I love you, Liz" into her ear, while her wrists and ankles chafed against the handcuffs as she writhed in pain and ecstasy... and then it was gone, an echo of two completely different people in a completely different time, of ships that passed in the long dark night, one heading for a breaking dawn, the other sailing further into the storm tossed darkness.

How cold do you have to be to intending to order the assassination of your ex-lover _without _being consumed by angst? Was her genetic inheritance reasserting itself? Was she the right person to be making this call?

'Right person or not, this is what they pay me for...', she thought. 'Although... if they only knew...'.


	27. In the Palm of the Dragon

In the Palm of the Dragon

It was lunchtime in Middleton when Agent Du emerged from the travel tube on the Directorate level of the Global Justice HQ complex. He still needed a shower, and he desperately needed to catch up on lost sleep; he had consciously tried not to sleep on the plane, to avoid screwing his body clock up even further than it already was - he didn't want to be falling asleep on horseback tomorrow! With luck, he would be in and out of debrief in twenty minutes - he didn't have much to report beyond "Miss Possible got onto the fourth junk in Lo Pin's flotilla OK", and he was surprised to be told that Dr Director wanted to hear that from him personally. He had expected to file his report with a junior operations officer, preferably via commlink. Still, he knew that Dr Director had no sense of proportion when it came to matters concerning Miss Possible, so perhaps he should have expected it.

He approached the door to her office and pushed the button. The door hissed open and he stepped inside.

"Doctor Dir...", he started to say, and then stopped in mid word. Dr Director was sitting at her desk, which was covered in maps and papers. A couple of Global Justice science geeks sat opposite her, looking very much like Will felt. Something was up!

The door hissed closed behind him, and seconds later there was a loud clunk, as the room went dark. When the emergency lighting flickered into life, it wasn't Dr Director who spoke first, it was one of the two science geeks.

"Jeez, mate... you smell like a ten dollar whore!", said the scruffy strung out looking man with the badge that identified him as Dr Callum Hawk, Global Justice Scientific Division, speaking with a broad Australian accent.

Agent Du eyed him disdainfully and said "Believe me, Dr Hawk, better this than the smell of Hong Kong Harbour it is covering. Would you like me to comment on _your _personal grooming? Or more accurately, the la...".

"Agent Du", interrupted Dr Director firmly. "We have a situation. Need to know only. And now you need to know. Shego is alive!".

"Alive? But... was she not on that plane?", asked Will Du, incredulously, his burgeoning verbal spat with Dr Hawk instantly forgotten.

"Oh, she was on the plane alright. But apparently, she really is indestructible.", said the other, more youthful, obviously English science geek.

"But... how..?", he asked.

"The details are unimportant at this moment, we'll brief you fully later. If and when we locate her, you will be our point man on the ground for a mission to... resolve the situation. For now, though, we need to find her. You understand the implications of Shego being out there and on the loose, given the circumstances?"

"Yes... yes, I've read the profile. I've seen her in action as well. I... assume my R&R is cancelled until further notice?".

"Yes Will... sorry about that, but I can see you understand why. You can take your leave as soon as we've sorted out this god-awful mess. ", said Dr Director apologetically.

"No problem, Dr Director. What do we know?", he asked.

"We know that ten days ago, she swam ashore on Ilha de Santo Antão in the Cape Verde chain. Nine days ago she walked, or at least hobbled, off the beach where she came ashore and vanished. She was clearly quite badly injured, and there were limited vectors for her to escape from that island. She obviously realised that everybody was going to assume that she died when that plane exploded, because she has stayed completely off the grid. We think that she has gone to ground somewhere, on the island or off it, and is laying up, healing up and marshalling resources. At some point, when she is ready and not before, we can expect her to attempt to exact revenge on whoever she blames for what was done to her. We are reasonably certain that that means the CIA. Mike Jones here has pointed out that there is a very small outside chance that Shego will believe we knowingly and deliberately handed her over to the CIA. In which case she might want to take out her misdirected rage on us first. I think that is unlikely, but we should nonetheless be aware of the risk.

"Our task now is to find her, and then neutralise her as a threat by the most efficacious means available. The Kinetic Operations Squad are on two hours stand-by to move, and... when did you last sleep?", Dr Director interrupted herself as she saw Will Du stifle a yawn.

"About 23 hours ago, I think, Dr Director.", replied Will.

"Well then, go home, and go to bed. I need you on top of your game, Agent Du. Not a zombie! You are also on two hours notice to move, but I don't anticipate us finding Shego in the next few hours, so get the hell out of here until we need you, consider yourself debriefed, OK?"

"Yes, Ma'am", said Will, brusquely, and turned back to the door, waiting for Dr Director to reconnect the power and hit the door release.

As he walked wearily towards the travel tube that he knew would eject him into a phone booth within half a mile of his apartment, he reflected upon the fact that a presumably extraordinarily pissed off Shego was still alive, still out there, and that it might very shortly be his job to lead a mission to take her on in a fight to the death.

Perhaps the Global Justice benefits package wasn't quite as generous as he had been smugly telling himself it was only a few hours earlier? 'I must remember, when I wake up... I haven't checked and updated my will for a while... best do that before I head out on my next mission...', he thought to himself, grimly.

oOo

As it happens, Kim Possible wasn't on Lo Pin's island within an hour and a half of the flotilla of junks climbing out of the water and up onto the plane. The vessels spent the next seven hours zig-zagging wildly and randomly across a vast expanse of the South China Sea, covering a huge distance as they ensured that they wouldn't be intercepted by anybody, as was standard operating procedure for Lo Pin's vessels whenever they headed to his island, a combination of natural pirate paranoia and a defence against ambush by his very real enemies. This, and the radar cloaking devices that the four vessels had activated immediately before the first radical course change ensured that the stealth hover ship that Dr Director had diverted from a mission over Taiwan to intercept the flotilla had failed to find any trace of them. They eventually approached Lo Pin's island, roaring in from the South East, just as dawn was breaking at about 5 am, while Kim slept like a baby in her cabin, the movement of the ship mercifully banishing the hideous nightmares that had recently disturbed her sleep so badly.

Kim awoke as the four junks dropped off the plane and very rapidly slowed as their hulls once more dragged in the water , and lay happily in the comfortable bed, blissfully relaxed and well rested. The four junks, still in line abreast formation, slowed almost to a halt and then just as they had almost lost steerage way, turned once again line astern and dropped anchor just off shore, prompting Kim to get out of bed and swap her pyjamas for the karate gi she had worn the previous day, and then head for the windows of her air-conditioned cabin to get her first look at her home for the next few days.

Klaustaffen island was far more impressive, imposing and forbidding in reality than it had appeared on the screen in Dr Director's office. The giant almost black volcanic plug rose vertically for hundreds of feet into the sky above Kim, its sheer sides devoid of vegetation barring the occasional tiny patch of green lichen, clinging precariously to the volcanic rock. Kim noticed tiny openings cut into the sides of the black cliff, the lowest she could see perhaps 150 feet above the tiny beach that separated the towering black bassalt plug from the clear blue sea. In a couple of the openings, Kim could see a glint of a reflection from the rising sun as the dawn light glinted off what Kim realised was window glass. That tiny beach bore further study as well - the immaculately groomed white sand, pierced occasionally by black rocks, was also home to a geometric arrangement of tiny black protrusions, protrusions that Kim recognised as the tips of the emitters of a laser grid, although she couldn't see the beams; perhaps it was turned off? Or perhaps it was using infra-red lasers instead of the visible beams she had previous personal experience of? Of course she also couldn't see what else was buried beneath the sand; was there a minefield under there? She had no desire to find out.

There was also, Kim noticed, a striking lack of bird life. Not a roosting Booby nor a nesting Shearwater, the native birds that Wade's background research on the flora and fauna of the area had led her to look for, to be seen anywhere; this struck Kim as a little odd, and reminded her of the dead zone around some super villain's lairs, and hinted at automatic laser turrets or other automated defences that might have cleared the skies of avian fauna. Not that she needed to be concerned about the island's external defences, since rather than sneaking on to the island through a sewer pipe and then crawling through the ventilation system to gain access, she was arriving through the front door as an invited guest and had no doubt she would be leaving the same way.

But the biggest aperture in the vast black obelisk was at the far right hand end of the massive craggy edifice, where a giant black cave mouth pierced the rock. Kim knew that this was the cave that had been the entrance to the old coaling station, and the dark water in front of it was a clue to the deep water channel that led into the giant inky black portal. And yet, if Kim hadn't already known, she would have assumed at a glance that the cave was shallow and contained nothing of significance.

As she watched, two lights, one green and one red, blinked on just inside the cave mouth, one to port and one to starboard, and she heard the faint sound of a turbine spinning up some distance away, and presently one junk very slowly moved towards the black cave mouth. The scale of the cave entrance became properly clear only as what Kim had spent the best part of a day considering to be a large ocean going tall ship looked more like a bath toy as it was slowly swallowed by the impenetrable blackness of the giant cave entrance.

The green and red channel lights blinked out as the ship vanished from view. Kim had no idea how long it would take to disembark each junk, but she realised that she would be on the last vessel to unload, and that she hadn't even had a wake-up call yet, so she assumed it would be a while before she would set foot ashore herself.

She closed the blinds and stripped off again for a shower, but not before selecting her outfit for the day; she chose the very stylish Kung Fu uniform that she had been presented with by Sigung Foo of Five Tigers Hung Gar Kung Fu, along with the Gold Sash he had awarded her at the end of the two week visit he had made to Middleton purely to train her during summer break back when she was 13.

It had become a regular thing for Kim; martial arts teachers would fly into Middleton just for the privilege of training her. After she had earned a junior black belt in Karate within three months of study at 5 years old, and then backed it up by grading at a similar level at the local Twae Kwon Do school and also in Lau Gar Kung Fu, all before her sixth birthday, the word had started to spread about the incredible little girl martial arts prodigy who lived in Middleton. Mrs Dr Possible had had conniptions at what her little Kimmie was cheerfully putting herself through, on her own, with no professional supervision or encouragement whatsoever, as she honed her tiny body to make it capable of performing techniques that nobody would ever have imagined a small child capable of. Indeed within a couple of years, she was working out how to _really _perform apparently impossible feats of martial prowess devised by Hong Kong cinema stunt directors rather than ancient warrior monks, feats that she had well understood were hitherto only ever possible for cinematic purposes with the assistance of wire and harnesses and special effects; Mrs Dr P had much more recently confided to Kim that she was quite pleased that child services didn't ever see what Kim got up to for fun in the back yard when she was younger, because explaining to them that 'If Kim is comfortable doing it, it must be OK!' might not have been quite as watertight a defence against a felony child abuse charge as it would have if they had known little Kimmie as she did.

However, somewhat before that, Kim had been effectively forced to teach herself basic but comprehensive human anatomy from some of her mother's medical texts, merely to fend off her mother's desperate concern that Kim would destroy her growing body; apparently Mrs Dr P found "I'm just stretching my left adductor muscle, mommy" a lot more reassuring than "I'm just stretching the funny one in my leg that pulls...".

The longer time went on, without little Kim suffering any detectable ill-effects from her apparently ridiculous self-motivated regime of exercise and gruelling extreme martial arts training, and the more she could see her daughter carefully managing her exercise programme, moderating it with great precision to protect specific muscles, tendons and joints from injury, and the more Kimmie was able to articulate what she was or wasn't doing and why, the more Mrs Dr P had accepted, against all her medical instincts, that somehow her little girl knew exactly what she was doing and the less inclined she was to rush her in to work and stuff her into the MRI scanner to see what terrible damage she must have done to herself today; by the time she was eight years old, even the sight of her young daughter gleefully breaking great stacks of roofing tiles with the tips of her fingers in the back garden no longer had her rushing outside holding her arms to her head in horror.

But one thing she had always been very clear about; Kim was staying in Middleton and having a normal life. Anne had nixed the idea of young Kim becoming a monomaniacal globetrotting ballerina at five years old, and she had no intention of her going the same way with martial arts. At least ballerinas got paid! She could have toured the country and probably the world, winning every competition she entered against all comers, but at a cost that Anne thought far too high to bear. Instead she stayed in Middleton, went to school and had a normal, well rounded childhood. Or as normal as childhood gets when you are a savant with a passion for martial arts, anyway.

However, as Kim had wowed all those who had taught her, not just with the amazing skills and abilities she was already able to showcase but with how inhumanly quickly she was able to assimilate and demonstrate new techniques, the mountain started to come to Mohammed. Before she was even ten years old, she was sparring and holding her own with the best competition fighters in the state in several styles; martial artists would come to town to the little strip-mall dojo she most often trained at for the sheer novelty of being beaten fair and square by a 9 year old girl. And Kim discovered a particular relish for sparring; she loved the way that combat felt like a unique performance, where the next sequence of moves she needed to make was dictated by the unpredictable response of the opponent rather than the dictates of a predetermined form.

In between sparring with the best adult fighters in a 500 mile radius, Kim was learning, then mastering, whole new systems and arts, the way other people collect stamps. Masters and teachers would come to Middleton from all over the country, later the world, either to pour scorn on the rumours that some kind of martial arts prodigy lived there by exposing her as some kind of fraud, _or _so they could say they had instructed Kim Possible on a poster one day, if as they suspected she well might, she were to become a future Olympic or world champion, _or _simply because they wanted to teach and work with somebody who other teachers had already described as "The best student they would ever teach".

Sigung Foo, though, was one of the first category. The Grand Master had flown over to Middleton all the way from his giant dojo, ancestral cradle of the Five Tigers branch of Hung Gar Kung Fu in China, with two of his most skilled masters as assistants, overtly and determinedly planning to unmask a _gweilo_ charlatan and prevent the corruption and debasement of his and his noble predecessors many lifetimes of diligent study, sullying the legacy of a proud and ancient martial art in the name of media hype and shallow decadent western imperialist notions of co-opting Chinese cultural values as their own.

That wasn't quite what happened.

He arrived expecting to denounce the redheaded young American teenager with the braces on her teeth as not worthy of even studying Five Tigers Hung Gar Kung Fu, let alone being feted as a prodigy.

Just before he flew home to China, a scant two weeks later, he had had the ornate uniform and the gold sash express shipped across to him from China and presented both to her, anointing her Si-Poo, which when she looked it up later apparently meant 'Grand Master'. Which was pretty impressive given that she had never seen any of the specific Five Tigers branch forms or techniques before he had arrived and demonstrated them to her. It didn't hurt that at the end of his two week visit to Middleton, 13 year old Kim was clearly head and shoulders in skill, technique, control, focus, precision, speed, athleticism and power, above the two senior Masters of Five Tigers Hung Gar Kung Fu that the Great Grandmaster had brought with him to help him to expose her. Honoured as she was at the time, the uniform was clearly sized for her to grow into and it wasn't something she was likely to wear anywhere outside a Kung Fu school anyway, so it had gone into a suit bag and vanished into the back of her wardrobe where it nested amongst various similar articles of clothing that she never wore, almost all of which were either now in her suitcase or bagged up and awaiting donation to a charity clothing drive back in Middleton, if they no longer fitted her.

Satisfied that her sartorial choice for landfall and her first day at the tournament was a particularly apposite one, she bundled up the gi and the previous day's underwear and stuffed them into her 'dirty washing' bag, and then headed cheerfully for the shower...

oOo

Shego lounged on deck impatiently. The queue of assorted martial artists in a bizarre variety of uniforms and garb stretched right around the deck of the junk, which was connected to the floodlit dock by a long gangplank. Above her, the roof of the giant cave was a long way above the tip of the main mast, and the dock was clearly capable of accommodating a much larger vessel than this hydrofoil come sailing junk. More than one, in fact. Indeed, from the array of heavy cranes, some positively antique looking, some more modern and even some quite recent looking state of the art container handling equipment, it was capable of unloading the booty from large vessels as well! It was in every way the perfect modern pirate port…

At the other end of the gangplank was another set of scanners, through which everybody was shuffling, laden with various items of luggage. There were a variety of lethal martial arts weapons being waved through the scanning arches with a cheerful nod, and nothing had set off the scanners yet. Patrolling the dock were two pairs of guards, one fore and one aft of the gangplank, each dressed in the snazzy Dragon Fist uniform and carrying a hi-tech crossbow. Shego was hanging back, watching the crowd as it shuffled forward. Just as she thought she might get off the ship without Lo Pin waylaying her and fitting her for the rather unwelcome plasma-shorting jewellery that she had implicitly agreed to wear on his island, he appeared alongside her and said "Please, step into my cabin for a moment, White Ninja.".

oOo

"Is this necessary?", asked Shego, as she placed the bracelets on Lo Pin's desk.

"No, of course not, Shego. You are welcome to swim back to Hong Kong without them…", grinned Lo Pin. She got the feeling that he might not be joking. She wasn't wild about having her plasma power short circuited, but she didn't reckon she'd have much difficulty getting the things off if she needed to in an emergency, not that she had worked out exactly how just yet. She was more concerned about her accommodation arrangements while she was here.

"Where am I billeted?", she asked, as a crew member plugged together a small spot welding machine on Lo Pin's desk.

"Stateroom 312, Shego…", said Lo Pin, studying a clipboard on his desk.

"I'd much rather have a room on the second level - can you arrange that?", she asked .

"Of course, Shego…", said Lo Pin, and turned to the computer on his desk.

There were a couple of minutes of silence, punctuated only by the tapping of keys and Lo Pin referring to the clipboard. By the time the crewman had finished setting up the spot welder, and was proffering pairs of semi-opaque sunglasses to both Lo Pin and Shego, Lo Pin looked satisfied. "Would room 256 suit? The section of the cliff face it is set in is actually slightly overhanging, both above and below, and the cliff face is particularly devoid of fissures and holes in that area…".

'Dammit. He's reading me like a book…', thought Shego.

"That would be just fine, thank you…", said Shego, as Lo Pin and the crewman both donned the black glasses. Shego demurred with a wave of her hand…

"Shego, they will protect you from arc-eye…", said Lo-Pin in a concerned tone.

Shego smirked. "Natural immunity…", she said, holding up a hand and lighting a momentary intense green flash between index finger and thumb. "Comes in handy when I can do that with my hands…".

"Ah, of course…", said Lo Pin . "You may want to stand on the rubber mat there, though. I don't know if you are also immune to high voltages, but I think getting the burn marks out of my carpet might be a problem even if you are."

Shego smirked again, as she donned the pair of Molybdenum Ferrucite bracelets and stepped onto the rubber mat. Then looking at the crewman with the welding clamp and holding out her hands, she said "You'd better do a good job of this; if there's one thing I _really_ can't stand, it's second rate welding... ".

oOo

It was time, decided Wade. On one screen, he had the ground control radar map for Chek Lap Kok, and on another he had flight plans for every flight scheduled to depart Hong Kong in the next hour. The aircraft he had decided was the ideal choice was an International Parcels cargo flight, and it was currently seventh in the queue to take off from the active runway, and sitting on taxiway Papa Alpha. His fingers flew over the keyboard, and 8,000 miles away, on top of a dockyard crane on Stonecutter's island, the Kimunicator blinked into life, then crawled over the edge of the roof of the crane and began to plummet towards the ground. Before it had fallen far, though, it sprouted wings and propellor, and soared back upwards. Wade switched to a joystick, and began flying the Kimunicator towards the airport. Within 5 minutes, the airport was in sight, and he identified his target, a Boeing 757 with the 'International Parcels' logo on the fin, and he dived low over the airport perimeter, then swooped up to land on top of the fuselage, engaging the electromagnetic clamps as he made contact.

'Perfect!', he thought, retracting the wings and switching the propellor to 'generator' mode, so that the movement of the Kimunicator through the air could power the electromagnetic clamps and top up the power pack once it took off. He had engaged the radar cloak before taking off from the roof of the dockside crane, so he knew his brief flight wouldn't have shown up on anybody's scope, but he quickly tapped in to the ground frequency in Hong Kong, just in case somebody on another aircraft had spotted his little flight and reported it. He was reassured to hear that his electronic stowaway had reached its berth unnoticed.

Five minutes later, the 757 was climbing away from Chek Lap Kok, and turning out over the ocean.

oOo

Ron stood on the deck of the third Junk in line and waited as his eyes adjusted to the darkness of the vast cave they had just slowly motored into. It had been about an hour since they had first dropped anchor off shore, and they had just passed the second junk in line on its way back out of the cavern as they headed in. The first junk had emerged from the cave about half an hour after it had entered, had raised its sails and by the time his own junk had hauled up anchor and headed for the cave entrance, its hull had dipped below the distant horizon.

As his eyes started to adjust, Ron could see a glowing marker in the distant darkness, which seemed to hover between two vertical glowing bars of light, and which the junk's helmsman was clearly using as a guide and target as he or she initially nosed the ship blindly into the inky blackness. The cavern was vast, and by the time what looked all the world like a small commercial port hove into view, the cave entrance was a small patch of daylight quite a distance astern.

The junk very slowly moved past a thick, luminously painted line up the walls and across the ceiling of the cave; it was obviously another marker, because as soon as it slid past the stern of the junk, it swung to port and headed straight for the floodlit dock, where there was apparently quite a large welcoming committee awaiting them. Looking over the stern, Ron could see that a boom had emerged vertically from the water, just inside the cave entrance, denying access from and to the sea.

As the junk approached the dock, the engines went astern and the ship slowed almost to a halt, before one of the propellers changed direction yet again and the junk slowly swung in parallel to the dock, as a crewman on the bow flung a heavy mooring line ashore, where it was grabbed by another man, also dressed in a Dragon Fist gi, and dropped over a bollard. As soon as the stern had swung in far enough, another line snaked through the air and landed ashore, before being dragged over a second bollard, and the whine of the turbines spooling down signalled that the engines' work was done for now.

More lines snaked through the air from the deck of the junk to the dockside, accompanied by shouted commands, which echoed around the massive cavern; small groups of people on the dockside, all identically dressed in the seemingly ubiquitous Dragon-Fist gi, clustered around each line and dragged the junk slowly in towards the dock, until it thudded into long, sprung, rubber-tipped bumpers that were hung over the dockside, and arrested the ship's movement about ten feet away from the dock wall proper. There were more shouted commands and the additional ropes were tied off to cleated bollards, and then big electric winches whined as the two initial big mooring lines that were now hanging loose over the large dockside bollards gradually tautened. Meanwhile, a dockside crane was already swinging overhead, with a gangway lazily swaying beneath it, as a couple of dockyard workers on the end of dangling ropes kept it pointing in the right direction. As soon as the ship was tight to the fenders, the gangway was lowered carefully in to place between the ship and the scanning arch. It all looked very professional.

Presently, the gangway was secured, the dock crew melted away and were apparently replaced by security guards and the gate in the ships rail was opened; Ron, who had headed up on deck long before the junk had hauled up its anchors and headed for the cave and had been waiting third in line for some considerable time, headed down the gangway with his wooden trunk balanced on one broad shoulder, behind a bald monk in saffron robes and a very short Chinese woman with a cartoonishly large sword slung across her back.

Out of the corner of his eye he very briefly caught sight of a rapidly moving tiny pink flash, on the underside of the large mooring line at the stern.

A flicker of a grin crossed his face.

At the bottom of the gangplank, he passed through the scanning arch, without raising any comment from the operators, and was waylaid by an efficient looking woman wearing, of course, a Dragon Fist gi, and carrying a small handheld terminal. She had obviously identified him from a picture on her little screen, as she smiled and said "Dai 10-kai nenji doragon no kobushi budō no tōnamento, Chonouryoku-san e yōkoso! O heya wa,-ka no shukuhaku shisetsu no reberu de hyaku san jū kara nana-sūdesu. Koko ni anata no kādokīdesu. Gozen nana-ji-dai hōru ni shūgō shite kudasai...", which roughly translated as "_Welcome to the 10th annual Dragon Fist martial arts tournament, __Chonouryoku-san! Your room is number 137 on the lower accomodation level. Here is your key card. Please assemble in the grand hall at 7am..._".

"Dōmo arigatōgozaimashita. Watashi wa Yamanouchi o arawasu tame ni koko ni iru koto o kōei ni omoimasu!", replied Ron. "But… please can we speak in English? I really need the practice…", he asked.

"Of course!", she said, tapping and altering his language preference on her terminal. And then she was greeting the next person through the scanning arch, as Ron moved to the left, out of the stream of people, and looked around the cavern; he was watching his fellow competitors coming ashore, looking at the dockyard equipment, staring at the distant roof of the huge cave some massive distance above and taking an interest in the equipment on the dock. This really was an extraordinary place.

Presently, Ron felt rather than saw or heard, a familiar scurrying sensation up his leg. The mildly ticklish patter of tiny feet made it up to his torso and then to his chest, before he heard a quiet voice saying "OK…".

'Saru Chounouryoku' promptly merged back in with the stream of humanity heading into one of the tunnel openings at the rear of the dock.

oOo

Ron swiped the key-card through the card-reader on the door of room 137 and the little LED light went from red to green, with a satisfying 'clunk'. He swung the heavy wooden door open and walked inside. The first thing that grabbed his attention was the view. It was all clear blue sun-drenched ocean to the horizon, from height, through the windows ahead of him; the window apertures were cut through solid rock and PVC coated armoured glass triple glazing panels had been recessed from the external face of the cliff, although there was no ledge below the glass to provide either a handhold or a roost for birds. It was a large room, hewn from solid rock, the floor hard and incredibly flat, but polished to a shine and then with milled grooves cut into it to simulate a tiled effect. The walls were similarly dressed up to chest height, but then were natural rock up to the high, roughly arched and vaulted ceiling, all complete with chisel, thermal lance and blasting marks, not that Ron particularly recognised them as such. The room was lit by wall mounted uplighters, courtesy of surface ducted wiring, controlled by a switch beside the door, and by another switch alongside the large, robust and comfortable looking sprung double bed, with a sturdy metal bedstead, a lightweight duvet & four pillows, and sharp creases providing evidence that the bed had been freshly made up. The room was actually comparatively cool, despite the disappointing lack of air-conditioning; the stateroom on the junk had been gloriously cold, all be it a little hard on the throat with its very dry air, which had contrasted absolutely with the brutal heat and high humidity on deck . Deep inside the basalt volcanic plug, it was both cooler and less humid than the air outside, but both those natural benefits of being deep inside a massive, basalt heat sink were being given a helping hand by an ingenious dehumidification system, consisting of a large bore copper pipe running the length of the external rock wall of the room over a gulley carved into the floor with a drain at one end of it; the pipe was obviously filled with fast moving chilled water, and condensate was running off it and pouring into the gulley, almost in a continuous curtain along its length within the room. There were rock benches carved into the 'walls' in a couple of places, and a very solidly fixed and empty chest of drawers with a table lamp solidly bolted on top, mounted in one corner of the room, alongside a low table, also bolted to the rock, with a mirror mounted on the wall behind the table. There was a chair tucked under the table, and above the mirror, a wall clock.

Ron placed his wooden trunk on top of the table and opened it to reveal a selection of neatly folded and rather small looking black shinobi-shozoko, all be it one less of the garments than there should be, and laying across the top of them corner to corner in the trunk, a non-descript but reasonably well crafted looking Katana in a plain wooden scabbard. The Lotus blade would hold this disguise indefinitely unless he or another Monkey Master commanded it otherwise, but as long as he was within a range where he could sense its presence, and it his, and for as long as he was embodying the flesh and blood of Toshimiru, the sword's original owner, it would answer to him above all other Monkey Masters. The sword had already placed Ron and Rufus in its pecking order of who it wished to be wielded by, and both sat above Monkey Fist, if he became aware of its presence on the island.

Ron quickly removed the shinobi-shozoko and placed them in the chest of drawers. Next came the world's clingiest expanding briefs, many pairs of, and then many pairs of socks and a spare pair of the incredible expanding twin-toed cleated black training shoes that Ron was wearing. Finally, and unexpectedly, there were several pairs of what Ron could only surmise where intended to be pyjamas, but were actually just a dead ringer for the lower half of his shinobi-shozoko, with a drawstring waist closure. On the one hand, it was obviously too hot for pyjamas at night here and he'd probably not even bother with the incredible expanding underpants in bed, whilst on the other given the shocking heat and humidity, they actually looked like they might be a comfortable option for training in!

Once he had unpacked, he began a detailed inspection tour of the room, walking slowly around the walls, inspecting the furniture closely, looking under the bed, and covering as much of the space as he could. Then he opened the uPVC door to the en-suite bathroom, and was hit in the face by a blast of heat and humidity. He closed the door behind him quickly and found himself in an equally large room, with similar décor, except that the floor was ground to a non-slip surface, and there was a drain in the middle of the floor. In the outside wall was one small window, open, and at the far end of the room, a much larger window, almost a French door over a low sill, which stood open to allow some air to circulate; not a door you would want to step through, though, unless plummeting to your doom appealed. A large shower, without a curtain, was situated in a rock alcove, again with a floor drain, and there was a toilet and a bidet in another alcove, surely the ultimate 'loo with a view'. There was no dehumidifying pipe through the shower room, either, but there was a well stocked towel rail, and a shelf heaped with bottles of shower gel, shampoo, face flannels and spare toilet rolls.

Once again, Ron carefully toured the room, peering into every corner, and examining every fitting closely. Once he had circumnavigated the entire room, a little voice said "OK!", and a pink head emerged from the V-neck of his shinobi-shozoko.

"Clear, Rufus?", asked Ron.

"Yes.. This room. Bedroom… no.", chittered Rufus. The little electronic gizmo he was carrying on his back was doing its work.

"Oh… that's… interesting! OK, well at least we can talk in here! What did you find, little buddy?", asked Ron.

"Night vision cameras. Light fitting nearest the door on that side, nearest the head of bed on that side, in the table lamp. Also microphone in table lamp. Motion sensor in middle of the ceiling!", chittered Rufus, gesticulating with his tiny pink hands. "Nothing in here though. Completely clear!".

"Hmm… that's some pretty heavy duty surveillance! And… that could complicate things! ", said Ron. "I think you should stay in here for now. Does that shelf look like a comfortable place to nest?"

"Hmm…", said Rufus, doubtfully. "A bit hard!"

"Hang on, let me stick a towel up there for you… there you go! I'll let you arrange the toilet rolls to hide behind.", said Ron. "And… I'll bring you back some breakfast!".

"Breakfast!", said Rufus happily, as he ran along Ron's arm and jumped onto the shelf…

oOo

Kim closed the door of Stateroom 377 behind her and headed back along the wide rock tunnel that she had earlier navigated while searching for her room. She had just had time to unpack her expensive suitcase on wheels and stow her clothes in the chest of drawers before she had to head back out again, this time for the 7am meeting in the grand hall. Which she first needed to find.

At the end of the long rock tunnel, which boasted carpet on the floor, strip lighting and periodic security cameras, was a steel gate which sat open, and was attended by a bored looking Dragon-Fist gi wearing guard, armed with a Jo stick. Then she entered a spiral tunnel which descended to a larger vestibule cave. On one side another tunnel, with another open gate and bored looking guard, headed downwards in a curve; Kim assumed that, as the sign by the tunnel entrance stated, it would lead down to the lower level staterooms, but she would check it out for herself after this 7am meeting, and some breakfast. A third open gate, with a third guard, gave entrance to a long straight tunnel with doors on one side only, and a sign by the entrance bore the legend '200-299', supporting the obvious conclusion that this was the tunnel leading to the second level staterooms.

A fourth steel gate, also guarded, was closed and locked; Kim knew where the now dark tunnel behind that gate went because she had walked up it from the underground dock not twenty minutes earlier. The final opening in this vestibule was a large roughly cut portal at one end, which clearly opened out into a larger area, from which she could hear a burble of voices, so that was the direction in which Kim headed.

She emerged into a large floodlit hall hewn from solid rock. Through a throng of heaving bodies, perhaps 300 strong, apparently all martial artists, who seemed to be forming a large semicircle around the perimeter of the hall, Kim could see long refectory tables and chairs, and some distance behind them, a long serving range, behind which worked a row of white-wearing chefs and kitchen staff . Behind them was a very large open plan stainless steel kitchen, in which more kitchen staff scurried around, as pots steamed, pans sizzled and woks clattered. But the focus of attention was a tall, powerful looking man standing on a raised dais, between the serving range and the refectory tables. He was dressed in a Dragon Fist gi, but crimson rather than blue, and he had striking white hair and a long matching moustache. He was flanked by three people wearing the ubiquitous blue Dragon Fist gi, and who Kim judged - from the flags pinned to their gi, and the microphones they held - were probably interpreters.

This was Kim's first sight of her host. He didn't look like the evil scourge of the South China Sea, slaver and pirate king, but then Kim was quite used to not judging books by their covers. She looked around her, to see if there was anybody she recognised. The Sumo ninja stood out, but only because he stood head and shoulders above the throng, and she thought she caught a momentary flash of a white shinobi-shozoko through the press of bodies, and she recognised a few of the uniforms of the people closest to her as coming from dojos and styles of which she had personal experience, but none of the wearers seemed familiar; she decided that she might try to introduce herself to any Anglophones from styles she recognised later to see if they had trained under anybody she had met.

As the large clock on the far wall of the grand hall clicked around to 7am, the general hubbub died down. A couple of stragglers came in behind Kim just as the hall fell silent. And then Lo Pin spoke for the first time.

oOo

Shego's Cantonese was fairly rudimentary, but she got the ghist of Lo Pin's opening sentence. He repeated the same thing in Mandarin, which she was more fluent in, and then in English; "Ladies and gentlemen, honoured guests, welcome to the tenth annual Dragon Fist Tournament!". Finally he reprised the line in Japanese, and then each of the three interpreters in turn recited the same line, variously in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and German.

His welcoming speech continued in similar style, one stanza at a time, in nine languages, so it was painfully slow going, but Shego tuned her mind out of the translations and focussed on the English version, which if she wilfully ignored the painfully long pauses for translation, sounded like:

"Thank you all so very much for coming. You have each been invited to participate in this festival of martial arts because you represent the best of the very best martial arts practitioners from all around the world. In joining me on my island you are also helping me honour the memory of my late father in a way that you may only come to fully appreciate at the conclusion of this tournament.

"While you are here, all of the facilities of the Dragon Fist Academy and indeed my entire island are at your disposal. There are only a few private areas that are out of bounds for your own safety during your stay, but they are all very clearly marked and my security staff will be happy to assist you if you are lost. For the next three days you are free to acclimatise and to train as you see fit, and then we will begin the main event, which will be a surprise that I will not ruin for you now. There is only one exception to that. Please do not spar amongst yourselves before the main event!".

That last sentence elicited a gasp and some disgruntled murmuring from different sections of the audience in each of the nine languages it was recited in, but Lo Pin continued "I say do not spar with each other, only because of the superior alternative we offer here at Dragon Fist Academy. Levels five and six of the school are devoted to advanced holographic combat simulation. The Academy has built hundred and twenty immersive simulators that will enable you to train against skilled computer generated opponents, without any risk of injury to yourselves before the main event begins. I would ask you to suspend your doubts and experiment with the training simulators, I believe you will be very impressed. We also have forty robotic grappling simulators on level four, for those of you who practice the grappling arts.

"During your stay, meals will be taken in this grand hall, starting very shortly with breakfast which will be at 7am for the remainder of your stay. Lunch will be served daily at 1pm and an evening meal at 6pm. I have tried to ensure that cuisine from all traditions is available at each sitting. Please don't hesitate to speak to the chef if you have any special dietary requests.

"So, finally, can I say again, you all honour me by your presence and I wish for you to enjoy the next three days of training as if they were your last on earth. Until we speak again, welcome, welcome, welcome!"

Lo Pin stayed on his dais, beaming genially, until the last translation ended with "...willkommen, willkommen, willkommen!", and then he quickly stepped down and strode away, to spontaneous applause from the assembled martial artists. A quartet of Dragon Fist men appeared, grabbed the dais one at each corner, and then jogged away with it between them. And then, once the last of the interpreters had vanished from view, a chef banged a very large gong. And that meant 'Breakfast' in everybody's language!


	28. The Beginning of the End

The Beginning of the End

25 January 2012

00:52

_**Eight years ago:**_

Shego pursed her lips grimly, as the high speed modem buzzed and whistled, then trained and connected to its counterpart on an unlisted local number. She had bounced the phreaked call all across the United States, and then via numerous undersea cables and satellite links, through exchanges in Japan, Korea and Luxembourg; if anybody _did_ manage to trace the call back to source, they would find themselves searching for the hacker around a payphone outside the john in a sleazy bar in a one horse town in Iowa. But they'd never get that far, partly because they'd need somebody at least as versed in the dark arts of cyber-crime as Shego to trace her call back that far, but mainly because they'd never even know that she'd been 'in' in the first place.

The anonymous X.25 login prompt that appeared on her VDU gave no clue to what lay beyond it. It was a long forgotten engineering 'back door' that would eventually lead her into the corporate finance system, an old modem sitting on a dusty shelf in a wiring closet at the back of a dark machine room, connected to a phone line that nobody at the corporation even knew existed. Her fingers flew across the keyboard, unwrapping the 'onion', each step moving her closer to her goal as she checked her notes for manufacturers default passwords and, as she penetrated further, carefully obtained or deduced access codes. Eventually, after bouncing around on the 'inside' of the corporate DP backbone, she smirked triumphantly, as a 'Welcome' screen scrolled slowly up her terminal window. At the very top, it announced "Hello Spare Finance Department User Account #3, Welcome to Go Corporation Management Accounting System!".

It had been a couple of years now that she'd been living a double life. By day, she'd been toeing the Team Go line, putting up with the petty indignities of the Go Foundation Trustees and the existential idiocy of Hego, intermittently fighting what little visible crime still occurred in the greater Go City metropolitan area the Team Go way. The nights though… they were _all_ hers.

Team Go, to pick an example from Shego's recent spare-time project list, wouldn't ever be seen visiting a respectable upmarket city jeweller who had made millions of undeclared dollars from trading trafficked blood diamonds into legitimate circulation and 'persuading' him to choose between on the one hand, giving up the trade and ratting out his suppliers and on the other, learning to breathe underwater in his own marble sunken bath. Team Go _certainly_ wouldn't be cleaning out his hidden safe at three in the morning, and giving most of the contents, minus a percentage to cover operating expenses, to carefully chosen appropriate charities. Nor would Team Go be breaking the kneecaps of the smuggling gang supplying him and then anonymously tipping the police off as to their whereabouts. Neither would Team Go be running the Russian Mafia out of town, smashing their rackets and pocketing some of their ill-gotten gains. And Team Go would never make irregular undercover nocturnal visits to the Go City red light district to turn violent abusive pimps into whimpering orthopaedic patients for shits and giggles.

For just over two years now, ever since she had relieved that bunch of drug-rapists of their ill-gotten gains, Shego had enjoyed quietly scrubbing away at the slime that lurked in Go City's deepest shadows, the fraudsters praying on little old ladies and the most unpleasant organised criminals that always seemed to be beyond the reach of the law, never mind the posturing buffoonery of Team Go. It had proved to be quite a lucrative hobby for her, in addition to being just satisfying enough that each morning she could face spending another day with the only family she had left in the world. Of course, of necessity, in her own time she operated in the shadows, rarely revealing herself to those she brought low, unless she decided they were worth co-opting to the growing list of people who she could call on to help her out somehow in future, thanks to the hold she had over them.

But she couldn't really do anything with her growing wealth; Hego was working minimum wage in a fast food joint, sleeping on a cot in the Go Tower and just about making enough to pay the Wego's allowance while they completed their education, and although it was entirely and inescapably his own stupid fault, and although he was basically a complete imbecile who deserved to suffer the consequences of his existential fuckwitedness, Shego couldn't help but think that he might be deeply hurt if she began flashing the cash around. And that was leaving aside the fact that he'd be aghast at the way she had come by it.

The Wego's were typical kids. The trustees of the Go Foundation had at least conceded that a public school education was incompatible with Team Go activities, so they were being tutored on the premises at Foundation expense. Mego was just bumming around, doing as much (or as little) as he needed to and no more, as he always did, while complaining that the world wasn't arranged for his sole convenience, also as he always did, and seemed intent on wasting his life. So Shego had more than one reason not to let Hego know what she was up to out of hours.

On paper, Shego was a full time student at Go College, funded by a mysterious scholarship that she had, in fact, set up for herself using some of the funds she had liberated from a Columbian drug cartel that had pretty quickly decided that Go City wasn't a good place to do business. It turned out that the informal and unconventional education that she had conspired with Amelia to fashion for herself made many of her courses moot, though; she was able to garner credit on courses in criminology, information technology, modern languages, aeronautical engineering, materials science, meteorology, forensic science , applied mathematics and forensic accounting with minimal effort; an unconventionally eclectic bachelors' degree had quickly followed, and then to fill time and stretch herself intellectually she had studied for a teaching certificate. She had quickly realised that she'd never make a teacher - teaching would seem to require a reserve of patience that she understood was entirely beyond her, and it was only a matter of time before some unruly pupil pushed the wrong button and earned a plasma enema, which while it would certainly be highly educational for the recipient, might be career limiting for the teacher administering it. But still, she enjoyed the intellectual challenge, and as soon as she had started the course she had known that she would damned well finish.

And she had.

Now she was just marking time, paying lip-service to a bare minimum of post-grad courses that she could pass in her sleep without needing to do anything that might feel like studying. It gave her an excellent excuse to be anywhere other than the Go Tower almost all of the time when they weren't 'on the job' together, and of course since a lot of her nights were spent wading through Go City's moral effluent, she used to catch up on lost sleep at home under the pretext of studying hard for exams she didn't need to study for nor even really care whether she passed or failed.

Other than making rent, paying tuition and buying equipment of her own, plus some on-the-sly gifts to the Wegos, and slipping Mego a few bucks to help her out with her vigilante sideline a couple of times when his need for money overwhelmed his general total lack of motivation, the rest was just piling up in various bank accounts in Switzerland and Lichtenstein. And a point of uneasy equilibrium had been reached, where Shego felt that she could survive, or at least continue to exist, in what amounted to a holding pattern with her life, for as long as she needed to, or until she found a good way out of the maze.

That uneasy equilibrium was about to be shattered.

Last week, Team Go had mobilised for the first time in about two months, courtesy of Aviarus who had chosen to draw Team Go out into the open by attacking the Go Municipal Orphanage. There had been mayhem and violence and a giant robotic bird that had made a satisfyingly large bang when it exploded in a giant fireball. And then Shego had chased the fleeing 'Dark Master of the Wing-ed World' back to his lair in the Go Jet, and there had been another explosive confrontation with the psychotic ornithological obsessive, involving exploding robotic hummingbirds, theatrical cackling and Hego being… well… Hego.

It was a good job he was effectively indestructible, since if he wasn't he'd have been dead the first time Team Go hit the streets! Shego remembered it well, as they had arrived outside the First Go City Bank to meet a fleeing, surprised and somewhat sceptical gang of violent armed robbers. The Wegos and Mego instinctively did the things they still did to this day whenever they ended up in a violent melee with 'evildoers' as Hego constantly referred to whoever their opponent was at any given moment, which basically amounted to 'Distraction' and 'Drawing (then dodging the incoming) Fire' respectively. Hego decided, incomprehensibly, to stand in the open in front of the bank with his hand up as if to say 'STOP', mouthing cheezy hubris-laden platitudes at the obviously puzzled group of heavily armed bank robbers, and very shortly Hego's moronic patter was drowned out by the sound of gunfire as various high-speed projectiles flattened themselves against his flesh. To describe him as 'Not the sharpest tool in the box' was to under-state the case significantly . The crowning glory was when one of the gang tried to run him over with the getaway car and ended up wrapped around him like a drunken driver round an oak tree. Hego, meanwhile, was still only on the third stanza of his 'Crime must not pay' introductory 'Formal speech to the villain and his or her hench-people', that he had obviously lifted verbatim from somewhere else, most likely from one of his damned comic-books. By the time he was ready to clobber a bank robber or two, it was all over; Shego had taken the balance of the gang down herself!

A little over two years later, little had changed. In fact, fighting with Aviarus made the whole 'Groundhog Day' vibe seem even more acute. And that had set all the little wheels turning in Shego's head. Who was building Aviarius' hi-tech toys? Who kept putting the roof back on his lair for him? Who was paying for it all? And above all, how the hell did a mentally ill obsessive with an avian fixation keep dodging justice to come back for another peck at Team Go? Why wasn't he detained in a secure rubber room, wearing a jacket with sleeves that tied up at the back, for the rest of his life after the very first time they had handed him, gibbering and ranting, over to the Go City Police Department?

But of course, Shego didn't actually have to wonder about the answer to questions like that any more. Thus it was that shortly after midnight that night she was sifting through the charred wreckage of 'The Nest' , her travails lit by a ghostly green glow. Two hours of evidence collection saw her leaving with a number of little plastic bags containing charred electronic components, the results of painstaking autopsies on numerous humming-bird carcasses, with batch numbers and manufacturers names embossed on them. But there was absolutely no paperwork in 'The Nest', there were no safes, there was no magnetic media and no sign of habitation; wherever Aviarus lived when plotting his obsessive attacks on Team Go, it definitely wasn't in his 'nest'.

And then once she had got them home, Shego had begun the painstaking task of tracing the components she had found through corporate provisioning, finance and stock control systems, tying them from the manufacturers to specific orders for specific customers, and then into specific sub-assemblies put together by those customers, and on into another set of purchase orders and deliveries to another customer. And Shego was shocked to discover that all the trails she followed led, despite some amateurish attempts to conceal them, back to the same place.

The Go Corporation.

The clear evidence was that there was an enemy within. And now Shego was going to unmask the cuckoo in the nest.

Shego interlaced her fingers, flexed them purposefully, and then with a determined expression on her face, ploughed into the Go Corporation Purchase Ledger...


	29. Island Life

29. Island Life

Kim placed her tray of dirty cutlery and crockery on the rack provided beside the serving range and looked around the room. While she had still been queuing for her breakfast she had caught sight of that woman in the white shinobi-shozoku leaving the great hall with a take-out box on a cardboard tray, because - Kim presumed - she was too shy to take her hood off in front of everybody. A handful of other people had done likewise, but the majority of competitors had sat at the long refectory tables and eaten breakfast en-masse. Kim had supposed that it would be a great opportunity to meet some of the people she would be competing against, but as luck would have it, neither the two men she sat between, nor the woman who sat opposite her, spoke a word of English. Nor, it seemed, did they share a common first language between themselves. There was some painfully stilted three way communication in what Kim recognised as Spanish, but it barely got beyond "Hello, my name is… and I come from…"; Kim had used intelligent guesswork to gather even that! If she had had the Kimmunicator with her she could have selected 'Simultaneous Translation Mode' and followed the conversation that way; all those country's visited and Kim was still as linguistically challenged as the most insular of her friends; the magic box of tricks had obviously made her lazy, and she had only noticed when she didn't have it to hand. All she knew was that the woman was from Brazil, judging by the Green & Gold of her uniform and the Brazilian flag on the lapel, one of the men was from somewhere in Western Europe, and the other from Russia. And that they had returned her smiles and polite nods when she left the table.

But right now… she was all about business! This wasn't much of a mission, but that was no excuse for not being conscientious, and the sooner she got it out the way, the sooner she could focus entirely on the serious business of enjoying herself to the max, before she had to return through the looking glass to a fairly unappetising reality...

oOo

There were four accessible levels above the mess hall, reached by rough hewn stone steps. The tunnels here were cut from bare rock, lit mainly by strip lights, occasionally by ancient bulkhead fittings, now equipped with modern LED bulbs, some of them flickering and non-functional. Occasional faded paint marks on the stone hinted at previous occupants of the island; some were faded remnants of Kanji signs, almost a century old, others were fragments of English only half as old, although nothing that was legible; it was clear that somebody had painstakingly scrubbed and chipped away at those markings to erase them as far as possible, many decades earlier. These tunnels and galleries were all shown on the old British maps that Kim had seen, and memorised. Some of the empty chambers now contained random modern stores, such as paper towels, toilet rolls, kitchen foil, bars of soap and laundry detergent stacked high; some of the more valuable items were stored in chambers protected from pilfering by more recently installed locked steel cage gates. Almost every chamber she visited on these upper levels bore evidence, by way of dust-filled blind bolt holes in the rock and ancient scrape marks on the floor, of having been stripped bare many years previously. One thing that there definitely wasn't any evidence for, though, was that any part of the old workings had been 'disappeared' to provide a hiding place for up to two hundred and fifty thousand tonnes of excavated material. In fact, until she came to a very solid steel ceramic laminate door that she knew led to a small gallery and the top of Lo Pin's volcanic plug, there was nothing that she hadn't been able to inspect personally, and there was not a wheelbarrow full of rock spoil to be seen! She supposed that behind the door there might be communication antennas, maybe a look-out post or something similar, or perhaps the all but impenetrable vault door was designed to keep intruders who might land on the top of the island out of the tunnel network? Either way, she didn't feel any motivation to be curious right now. She crossed the upper levels off of her mental checklist and then retraced her steps.

Heading back down to the mess hall, she quickly explored the two accommodation levels she had yet to visit. They were mirrors of her own level, which she had explored at least visually en-route to breakfast. A long snaking tunnel that had been hewn out into a corridor and then 'prettied up', with locked doors apparently giving access to suite after suite just like her own, judging from a glance through an open door as she passed. This area was all Lo-Pin Junior's work - it had first been mapped by the last British Special Forces team that had visited the island and made it back to tell the tale. And common to all three accommodation tunnels was the sudden stop at a rock face when Lo Pin had decided he had enough rooms. Again, there was no hidden rock spoil here! But there were more cameras. In the old upper level tunnels, the ones used primarily for storage or effectively unused, the density of the security cameras seemed quite low, although there was a cluster around the steel door at the top of the complex. On the accommodation levels, there seemed to be cameras everywhere in the communal areas.

Once more she headed back to the mess hall, which seemed to be the point where all paths crossed. A well signed spiral staircase, half hewn from the rock, half built up from concrete, and none too recently looking at its faded and stained patina, led down from an alcove in the mess hall to all three levels of the dojo facilities.

The extraordinary geological formations in this part of the volcanic plug had basically delivered an arrangement of solidified bubbles in the basalt that was simply begging to be re-imagined by the designer of the original coaling station as a network of three levels of individual natural cavern come coal bunkers. These bunker-caverns were linked together by three perfectly horizontal tunnels cut straight through the plug and fitted with heavy rails so that trucks for moving large volumes of coal could run backwards and forwards across each level, hauled through pulleys by a large stationary steam engine which filled the cavernous space where not long before Kim had eaten her breakfast. Of course all, or almost all of this industrial archaeology was long, long gone now, but if you knew what you were looking for, because you had studied the plans of the old coaling station in acute detail, the twin worn grooves in the floor of the arrow-straight stone corridor on what the signs indicated was Level Six were highly evocative of a faded past glory. Or past hubris.

However, whatever unspoken message the fascinating industrial archaeology around this part of Lo Pin's complex might convey, Lo Pin had certainly totally re-invigorated this large network of abandoned and forgotten workings. Each former bunker cavern now had a door of its own and was individually numbered, with an indicator light outside to show whether it was in use or not. Inside, the floor of each cavern was covered with a mat, the rock walls painted white, state of the art floodlighting and ventilation made these spaces that were buried deep in the bowels of the plug of an extinct volcano seem bright and airy rather than dark and claustrophobic. But Kim found the most interesting aspect of all these little mini dojos to be the 'holographic simulation' part. Kim was looking for rock spoil, not to practice just yet, but she couldn't resist a peek through a crack in the door of one of the occupied caverns, to see the Russian guy she had breakfasted with seemingly sparring with a trio of faceless but fully anthropomorphic and slightly luminescent opponents. It was fascinating, but it was also distracting her from her mission, such as it was. Nevertheless she was eagerly looking forward to getting to play with what looked like something really cool and really fun as soon as she was done with 'the day job'.

Kim moved back down the corridor to the spiral staircase she had entered by, and continued down to Level Five, which would have been almost indistinguishable from Level Six if it hadn't been for the signage. Again she traversed the length of the main lateral corridor , passing many closed doors with red lights outside signifying many occupied holographic simulation suites, and only a few doors with green lights outside; once again, she found absolutely no evidence of any of the detritus of concealed tunnelling activity.

The spiral staircase ended on what was now signposted as 'Level 4' of the complex. Here were more doors, but here behind each door was what looked like the mutant offspring of a mechanical bull, a grid-iron tackle dummy and a crash test manikin. The impression that this very industrial looking piece of hydraulically powered equipment would be ponderous and slow moving was only dispelled when she peered through the slightly ajar doorway of an occupied simulator cavern to see a white haired Aiki-Jutsu black-belt engaged in a very fast moving and dynamic ballet with one of the mechanical marvels as they tried to pin and throw each other. Kim had to be strict with herself and drag herself away before the denouement, but she knew she needed to finish her mission before she could allow herself to kick back and have fun.

Level Four differed from levels Five and Six in two other key architectural ways as well. At one end of the corridor was an armoured elevator door, accessed by a key card and retinal scan entry system, and a veritable battery of cameras; the corridors on levels four, five and six were otherwise far less oppressively camera-saturated than the accommodation levels. Kim knew only that the elevator led to three lower levels to which she didn't have access, but which she had been assured by both Global Justice's briefing materials and by Wade's analysis of the mapped known tunnel network, were simply not physically large enough to contain even half the estimated eighty thousand cubic metres of spoil from any serious attempt to dig up the buried nuclear device components, even if they were filled completely from top to bottom.

Level one was where the abandoned, backfilled shaft that was the root cause of her mission was situated. Kim knew, thanks to the various weighty intelligence reports she had read, that the lower three levels were also believed to contain Lo-Pin's private quarters, medical facilities, detention cells, services such as a power generation plant, water purification and desalination equipment and barracks for Lo Pin's guards. It was also assumed that the main security control centre for the island would be down on the lower levels. However, beyond the 50 year old historical layout map (as partially and incompletely amended over the intervening years by visiting British covert operatives), nothing was known about what now lay beyond those elevator doors. On the other hand, Kim really didn't think she wanted or needed to know; she suspected it was probably something unsavoury, but she had Dr Director's stern warning about the potential negative consequences of going off the reservation and 'building her part' in mind on one hand, and the lure of her dream vacation before her on the other, so unusually for her, it really wasn't a can of worms she was remotely interested in opening.

The second major architectural distinction between Level Four and the two levels above it was at the other end of the corridor from the armoured elevator entrance; a tunnel entrance had been cut through the rock about a decade previously. The mouth of the 'corridor end' of this relatively recent extension to the complex was protected by a heavy duty steel gate which was chained open at present, but was attended by the obligatory bored looking Dragon Fist gi wearing guard; the comparatively freshly cut tunnel turned sharp left after 25 metres and at the far distant end of it, once round the bend, Kim could see bright sunlight.

As the sunlight got closer, Kim was aware of more steel gates, a couple of what looked like big either carbon steel or possibly even titanium versions of a medieval castle portcullis embedded in the ceiling and ready to slam shut at the first hint of a need to seal up the tunnel, and a couple of sets of multi-tonne hydraulic ram actuated armoured steel laminate blast doors, set in alcoves in the tunnel wall. Clearly when Lo Pin made this hole in the side of his impregnable rock fortress, he took great pains to make it easy to plug at the push of a button. As she approached the tunnel entrance, Kim could see she would be emerging onto a small sunbathed rocky ledge, surrounded by a low wall, and beyond that she could see only sky.

The thickest blast doors were predictably at the outer tunnel portal, where another portcullis formed the outermost line of potential defence against intruders, and what looked to Kim like a giant titanium iris valve surrounded the tunnel just behind it, but to be honest, the small stone ledge she found herself standing on was hardly an easy route into Lo Pin's geological fortress, blast doors and iris valves notwithstanding. For a start, the tunnel entrance was still two hundred feet above the jagged rocks of an unforgiving foreshore, on the side of the island opposite to the narrow beach overlooked by the accommodation levels . From here, and you'd definitely struggle to get to 'here', there were precisely two viable options, once you discounted scaling a sheer almost glass smooth wall of volcanic rock above you; you could enter the tunnel, or you could climb the exposed staircase carved into the cliff face that led up, eventually, to the terraces and open courtyards of the Dragon Fist Academy above.

Kim caught herself enjoying the moment as her eyes swept slowly over the stunning vista presented by the shimmering sea below her tiny rock perch and she breathed deeply of the warm but still welcome sea breeze. Her mind was already shifting gear as she mentally turned a page to what was coming next. She knew that the interior of the island wasn't crammed with crushed rock spoil, so her mission was now effectively accomplished. For completeness, or more likely because of the borderline OCD issue that kinder souls opted for describing as her 'Kimness', she would explore the Dragon Fist Academy area at the top of the narrow rough-hewn stone steps that climbed steeply towards the distant cliff-top; however, since she knew that almost all of the Dragon Fist dojo was open to the sky, and thus visible to satellite surveillance, it certainly wasn't a viable hiding place for tunnelling spoil. As soon as Wade dropped off her Kimmunicator with her, she would report in to Global Justice to that effect, but she realised that she had no idea when that would be; if Wade thought she were sailing to the island on a traditional junk, rather than a turbine powered hydrofoil, it could be days yet before her little blue lifeline put in an appearance.

Kim smiled to herself as she turned sharp right and began to run up the rock steps, slowly at first and then more quickly, knowing that for just a few days, she wouldn't have to save the world, or worry about her relationship with Ron, or wrestle with the emotional fallout from Shego's death, or traverse the moral minefield of her relationship with Global Justice and its treatment of poor Wade or... well, think about anything except the simple but immersive joy of combat. Inside her own head she began to whistle a happy, carefree tune to herself, and the loping run became an exuberant full-throttle sprint...


	30. The best laid plans

30. The best laid plans...

Operative Theta Epsilon Gamma, or ΘΕƔ for short, sat hunched over his console, which was (along with three identical consoles ranged around it), the only source of illumination available in the inky darkness . His responsibility for the remaining four hours of his six hour shift was a quadrant of sky and sea, 110 degrees worth once the boundary overlaps were taken into account, and his work ethic was bolstered by a very graphic understanding of what would happen to him if he screwed up in any way. Or if he was believed to have screwed up. Or if his supervisor thought he might be about to screw up.

He still remembered the briefing his team leader had given him two months earlier during his induction session, at the end of six months intensive training in the depths of a South American jungle. "Look at my chest…", he had said. "Epsilon… Beta… ; that's two letters. Now look at each of yours. Three letters. Do you know how many two letter operatives there are still working for WEE? One. Me. Do you know what happened to the all the rest of the two letter operatives, along with all the Alpha, Beta & Gamma range three letter operatives?".

Of course he had been curious. He'd really wanted to know what had happened to them. Had they quit? Been fired? Died heroically in action? But once Εϐ had gone on to show and tell the freshly trained cannon fodder exactly what fate had befallen so many of their predecessors, in gory detail, with occasional post-mortem pictorial slides, his curiosity had been supplanted by an almost-paralysing fear of what the future held for him.

Having got their undivided attention, Εϐ had then been perfectly blunt and straightforward about the purpose of the briefing; he was looking after his own future health and wellbeing. "I'm still alive today for two reasons", he had said. "One is because I try to be a great commander. I look after my troops, I treat them all fairly, I cover for them whenever I safely can, and I always make sure neither I nor anybody on my team ever get caught screwing up. But the other reason, you should understand, is that if any one on my team looks for even a moment like they are going to fuck up and get me fired out of a cannon with them, I'll decapitate them myself, and deliver their freshly severed head to Gemini on a sterling silver platter as soon as look at them! And by 'them', I really mean 'you', since you are all as of now assigned to work for me!".

There had been a general sharp intake of breath. Εϐ had stared intently at each of his potential new team members one after another; when it was his turn, ΘΕƔ had found himself staring back into what looked like a black hole; Εϐ's eyes were utterly dead, devoid of any spark of human emotion. Once he had been right round the room in the same disconcerting way, he continued very matter-of-factly, "It's nothing personal, by the way. And because it's just business, I'm going to give you a one time, never to be repeated offer. If you don't think you can live up to the exacting standards I will require of you, and you want out, just leave now with my blessing, and nothing more will be said!"

Half a dozen of the newly lettered operatives had stood up quietly and headed for the door. ΘΕƔ would have dearly loved to have walked away himself; nothing would have made him happier, but he had made a point of reading the small print in the agreement he'd signed upon joining, and he suspected that the half dozen who had just left the room wouldn't be living long and happy lives hereafter. And indeed, ΘΕƔ never saw them again, despite no vehicles leaving the site to head back to civilisation; it was hard to escape the conclusion that they were now providing nutrition for the grateful jungle fauna within stumble-at-gunpoint range of the camp perimeter. Or possibly even within dragging-a-sack-with-a-corpse-in range.

So here he now sat, in the dark, his concentration on the screen in front of him enhanced by the sheer, all encompassing, terror of making the smallest mistake.

A blip appeared on the scope, accompanied by a tag containing a screed of information. Whatever it was didn't have a radar transponder, and it was heading straight for him on a descending vector from 25,000 feet. More worryingly, it wasn't showing up on radar at all, having been detected purely as a result of the faint electro-magnetic radiation it was emitting .

Only five minutes ago, he had tracked India Papa 415, the regular morning International Parcels cargo flight out of Hong Kong, into through and finally back out of the far end of his quadrant, so his first thought when a blip appeared was that maybe it had turned round and headed back to Hong Kong with a technical issue; part of his duties when tracking a commercial flight through even the further reaches of 'his' airspace involved covertly checking the airport departure & ATC logs for the flight, logged communications traffic, weather, customs records and manifests, looking for the tiniest inconsistency that might reveal a deception of some kind, or 'something else' disguised as commercial traffic, and India Papa had come up squeaky clean, so such a turn of events wouldn't have concerned him unduly, but an incoming stealth bogey certainly had him twitching!

He punched up the high-resolution long range tracking camera, aimed and focussed on the location of the sensor contact. He wasn't sure what he expected to see, but he definitely expected to see something! Which meant that a picture of nothing but empty sky was more than enough to jangle his nerves!

It was only when he switched the magnification up to maximum that he was able to faintly discern a tiny spec, and what might turn out to be wings and a rotating prop when the target got closer. As he watched, the computers, the passive electromagnetic radiation detectors and the optical image processor combined to calculate accurate dimensions, including wingspan, for the UFO. These dimensions were added to the existing information tag on the sensor tracking screen.

He hit the 'Call Supervisor' button.

It was about 45 seconds before Εϐ appeared over his right shoulder and asked "What have you got, ΘΕƔ ?", 45 seconds during which the bogey got about 2 miles nautical closer to him.

"I've got a bogey, Sir. It's 39 nautical miles down range and closing on a bearing of 284 decimal 3 degrees, at Angels 23. It is currently descending on a vector that brings it right here at about 140 knots ground speed. It has no radar reflection, but electromagnetic signature indicates electric motors and high power consumption electronics, with a wingspan just over half a meter. No weapons identified, no type identified, no information available concerning bogey load-out, capabilities or operator. Profile suggests ultra-lightweight advanced surveillance drone, possibly military in origin, launch platform unknown. Likely operator; any one of many national law enforcement, numerous state intelligence agencies, our landlord's competitors or even Lloyds of London. My recommendation; allow the bogey to close to within 15 miles, where it can be scanned and photographed in sufficient detail to achieve a positive identification, and possibly traced back to source. Only then should we surgically bring down the drone using pulse laser fire at no less than ten miles range to disable it, and we should immediately scramble a retrieval team to pull the wreckage from the water for dissection and further analysis!", said ΘΕƔ, with perhaps a touch of over confidence.

"Just one thing about that recommendation…", Εϐ said calmly but icily. "If the drone is close enough to us at 15 miles that we can scan it in detail, then it might be close enough to scan us in detail. Do you want to explain to Gemini exactly why you decided to allow an unidentified surveillance drone to scan this island despite tracking it on approach for over ten minutes before it got into sensor range? Or why you then bought it onto the island substantially intact?"

ΘΕƔ sensed immediately, as the icy hand that had momentarily loosened its grip on his entrails clenched violently once again, that a wrong word uttered now could see him as shark bait within minutes. "No sir, I don't. My revised recommendation is that we knock the bogey down, with the objective of total and instant mid-air destruction; that should prevent any useful analysis of our response by whoever is operating it. Suggest focused EMP to achieve that at ranges in excess of 25 miles. Bogey now 37 nautical miles down range, Angels 22, still 150 knots ground speed, ETA at likely maximum on-board sensor range is seven minutes", he said very calmly, as he screamed in abject terror inside his own head.

There was a silence that lasted mere seconds, but felt to ΘΕƔ like many hours or even days, before Εϐ said, in his usual emotionless way, "Recommendation accepted, ΘΕƔ . Take it down, take it down hard, and take it down now!".

"Yes sir!", said ΘΕƔ, hoping that he had dodged the bullet that he had been convinced had his name indelibly engraved upon it. Now all he had to do was hit the damned drone first time! He lifted a sprung transparent flap covering a red illuminated square button marked "Waveguide deploy" with his thumb, and stabbed the button with his forefinger. Immediately it began to flash amber, and several violet rotating beacons attached to the ceiling began to whir, as a mercifully not too loud klaxon began to sound intermittently. In due course, the flashing amber button would change to glow solid green, signifying that the giant metal fabrications that made up the emitter waveguide connected to the flux compression generator of the EMP weapon had finished deploying from their concealed bay far above him and were ready for action . In his minds eye he could see the big hydraulic rams groaning as they pushed the rock cap aside on shiny metal rails, and then the massive greased triplex chain clanking one tooth at a time on the huge drive sprocket as the glorified giant telescopic drainpipe slid menacingly up and into position. In the meantime, he selected a power threshold for the shot. Normally for a tiny target like this, 10% of maximum available power would be one hundred times total overkill already. But, since he realised that his very life depended on the drone being entirely obliterated, he decided that there was only one way to be absolutely, positively, completely sure that the drone would never play the piano again; he pushed the 'Threshold' slider all the way to the safety gate at 80%, and then through the slight resistance, into the red zone and all the way to 100%. Then he turned his attention to the targeting computer…

oOo

Kim sauntered down the spiral staircase from the mess hall with a purposeful smile on her face, stepping off onto level 6. She had just finished a cursory look around the sun drenched terraces at the top of the cliff-face rock steps she had sprinted up to return to the mess-hall level, and as was already blatantly obvious, there was nowhere that even several tons of rock spoil, let alone several million tons, could possibly be concealed up there. However, as she had glanced around the upper terrace to confirm to herself the obvious, Kim had once again been intrigued to see the woman in the cream coloured shinobi-shozoko who had earlier reminded her of Shego. The woman was literally just finishing a series of stretches, some of which looked easier and less painful than others, and a minute or two after Kim caught sight of her, she stepped up to one of the long row of big stainless steel Win Chun dummies that lined the seaward edge of this large upper terrace and launched into a blisteringly rapid rendition of the classic Win Chun Dummy form, except (rather confusingly for Kim) that at key moments she extemporised to smash her left thigh into the metal 'body' of the dummy with what appeared to be brutal force, and she did it time and time again. It looked to Kim like an act of calculated masochism, and yet, between the sickening thud of thigh on solid tubular steel, Kim once again found herself reminded of Shego's form and style. After five minutes of watching the woman curiously, she forcibly dragged herself away, berating herself silently for being foolishly delusional. Not only was seeing an obviously imaginary Shego everywhere during her waking hours a disturbing counterpoint to her now regularly nightmare-disturbed sleep, but she was anxious to try out Lo Pin's simulation technology.

Glancing along level 6, Kim was gratified to see that the indicator light outside one of the caverns was green, to indicate that it was vacant; presumably somebody had packed up practising early? No matter, rather than having to hunt for a vacant Holographic training cavern, here was one available right in front of her in the first place she looked. She jumped at the opportunity, jogging down the corridor towards it.

It was as Kim reached the door of Holographic Dojo 645, as converted bunker cavern 45 on Level 6 now styled itself, that the lights in the corridor dimmed significantly for about two seconds, and Kim could hear the background hum of machinery and distant whirring fans that seemed to pervade many of the 'public' areas of the island change note briefly, accompanied by a chorus of annoyed yells and groans from the other holo dojos within earshot. Then, just as she was starting to wonder what the problem was and whether it was going to interfere with her keenly anticipated training session, the lights all brightened again, the sounds returned to their normal tone and level, and it was as if nothing had happened. She pushed open the door of the bunker cavern and headed inside.

oOo

Wade blinked at the hissing snowstorm on the screen in front of him in utter disbelief. One moment he'd been monitoring the Kimmunicator as it flew itself towards Klaustaffen island and the presumably waiting Kim, the very next moment, nothing at all!

He methodically tried to re-establish communication via every channel, technology and route he could; he knew that if the device was still functioning, the Kimmunicator's on-board AI would itself be independently trying every means possible to re-establish communications with him!

From the Kimmunicator there came not a peep! He'd never actually lost all communication with the Kimmunicator for any period longer than half a second before; the most his clever algorithms had had to deal with was an abrupt blocking of one mode of communication, forcing him to jump to another. If the Kimmunicator suddenly lost sight of the sky then it might instantly shift from satellite communications to VLF radio, or its onboard AI might autohack a nearby GSM cell tower or even a Wi-Fi hotspot if one was within range, or it might piggyback onto a nearby high tension power transmission line and autohack the in-band switching control channel and then… well, the bottom line was that he had a hundred different ways of talking to the Kimmunicator, and the Kimmunicator had a hundred different ways of getting in touch with him. So if contact had been broken entirely, something unprecedented had happened...

After about half an hour of fruitlessly attempting to reconnect with the missing device, Wade threw in the towel, accepted the inevitable, and turned to the logs to look for clues to what might have gone wrong.

It had all been going so well. The International Parcels flight he had hitched a ride aboard had passed within 50 miles of Lo-Pin's island at 35,000 feet. He'd disengaged the magnetic clamps and flown the Kimmunicator off the cargo plane's back without smashing the little electronic gizmo to pieces on the plane's tail. Then he'd aimed the Kimmunicator at Lo-Pin's island and left it to get on with flying there while he sat back and sipped on the tall glass of orange squash that his mother had kindly brought in for him. When it got there he would have taken manual control and then started to optically scan the area for Kim's unique hair colour...

The video feed from the last few minutes of the Kimmunicator's ill-fated flight showed a clear blue sky, a distant island in the middle of a sparkling azure sea directly ahead, and then... nothing. The detailed telemetry feed was similarly suddenly cut off. But when Wade zoomed into the detail, he found an anomaly. The last five hundredths of a second of the telemetry transmission before it ended abruptly showed a massive and building power surge, and an instantaneous massive rise in internal and external temperature. Only two things could cause that; one would be an internal short circuit caused by a fault of some kind, the other would be an incredible amount of external electromagnetic energy. The former could be ruled out, not that Wade didn't have confidence in his own abilities or the reliability of the Kimmunicator anyway, because the power cell telemetry didn't report the kind of additional current drain that a short circuit would cause. So that left an external power surge. And that… couldn't be an accident!

The power surge was incredible, literally, because Wade had designed and built the Kimmunicator and he knew exactly how much active & passive EMP protection he had engineered into it, and exactly how vast an amount of energy it would take to overwhelm the shielding. He'd built the Kimmunicator to be able to survive a reasonably close encounter with the EMP from an airburst tactical nuclear weapon. He had always considered that to be massive overkill, and only the technical challenge it presented had made it worth all the effort. But apparently, and surprisingly, he hadn't shielded the Kimmunicator enough!

A quick check of the global seismological monitoring network was enough to confirm what he already knew; that there hadn't been a nuclear explosion in the Sea of Japan. That left only one obvious option, an extremely worrying one…

He went back to the video log. One of the benefits of the live feed from the Kimmunicator's Ultra High Definition camera, massive bandwidth hog though it was, was the vast amount of detail it captured for later analysis. So when Wade keyed up the video of the last 5 minutes of the Kimmunicator's flight on one of the wall of huge monitors around him, and zoomed in on the distant island which was holding steady centre screen, instead of dissolving into a blocky blobby mess, a low resolution video image of an island appeared. It bounced about a bit, as the Kimmunicator was buffeted in flight, but it mostly sat filling the screen, its unchanging outline gradually growing.

Or… not unchanging! In last 30 seconds of the video, the silhouette of the island changed ; something rose sedately from the top of the volcanic plug, contrasting starkly against the twinkling blue sea, like a periscope rising from a submarine. And then, the snowstorm as the transmission was cut off.

Wade couldn't be certain, but he suspected that he was looking at the waveguide for an EMP weapon. Lo Pin had an EMP weapon on his island? Nothing in any of the briefings or intelligence files he had read about Lo Pin had prepared him to expect anything like that. Or indeed scanning technology that could spot something as small and stealthy as the Kimmunicator at 40 miles range! And now Kim was, as far as he knew, on that island, beyond his ability to help keep her safe. He felt a wave of fear and panic starting to rise, and he sternly forced them back down; he could be no help to Kim if he 'lost it'. He needed to be cool. He needed to be analytical. He needed to do what needed to be done to make sure Kim was safe. And then… then there would be no reason to be scared anyway.

He made some rough dimension measurements from the best image of the protrusion atop the island, and then his fingers flew over his keyboards as he mathematically modelled an EMP weapon in his planet-sized mind and designed a series of equations to determine its range and power for a given known input power. Then, he flipped the equations round and plugged in the range and energy numbers from the last few milliseconds of Kimmunicator telemetry, adjusted to take account of the Kimmunicator's EMP shielding. He hit 'Enter' with a triumphant final flourish.

And then he blinked.

He knew he didn't make mistakes, but he re-checked his working again anyway. He found no errors. Which meant that the Electro Magnetic Pulse that had apparently taken down the Kimmunicator must have had at least… 2.8 Gigawatts behind it!

2.8 Gigawatts… Wow! That was enough, Wade knew, to power the entire city of Chicago! And yet.. and yet he had seen no smoke rising from chimneys on the island on the video, which rather hinted that the immense power that had fried the Kimmunicator wasn't developed by a fossil fuel fired generating station, leaving aside the fact that it would be something of a challenge concealing a conventional power station inside the island.

He checked the telemetry logs again, looking at the continuous air quality monitoring specifically; the lack of combustion products in the atmosphere rather supported the idea that there wasn't a conventional power station on the island, and analysis of what Lo Pin had apparently purchased or hijacked over the past few years pretty much confirmed it. Lo Pin had certainly hijacked a few oil tankers over the years, but Lloyds register records indicated that they'd all been ransomed back to their owners, complete with their precious cargo, and a quick global trawl of the internal 'Bill of Materials' systems of every company in the world that was capable of building a generating plant large enough to power a city, compared against their published order books and related shipping manifests, sealed it; there was no city-scale fossil-fuel powered electrical generation plant on the island.

Generating technology by generating technology, Wade considered and was able to eliminate every alternative. That meant, after everything else that could generate at least 2.8 Gigawatts on demand was excluded, that there was only one remaining possibility; nuclear power!

Nuclear fission was a possibility, only because of the large quantity of fissile material that, Wade was uncomfortably aware , was already on the island, all be it at the bottom of a shaft under miles of concrete; no other Uranium or Plutonium, enriched or otherwise, had made it onto the island as far as he could see, let alone sufficient imported nuclear fuel to keep a reactor fuelled and generating.

It didn't really add up anyway. Wade realised that if Lo Pin had dug up the components of a giant nuclear bomb on his island but had then somehow fashioned the weapon's core into fuel rods for a nuclear power plant and used them to generate electricity, then most of the people currently concerned about the island and its buried secrets would breathe a sigh of relief and consider the problem to have gone away. But he would still have needed to have found and dug up the bomb components, and then you would need to believe, having found the largest nuclear bomb ever built, all be it in 50 year old pieces, that the best plan that Lo Pin, a man well versed in the art of ransom, could come up with for monetising his discovery was… developing a nuclear power plant and then using it to save on his fossil fuel bills? This seemed… unlikely.

Then there were the technical issues. Wade knew, having studied the British Atomic Weapons Establishment's top secret files, that the reason that the British had dismantled the weapon in situ was because it was never designed to be transported and could not be moved safely in one piece, and yet could not be safely dismantled either. A small cadre of brave technicians had therefore gone down the unfilled shaft with the giant bomb and dismantled the weapon in situ, moving the components as far apart as possible before positioning huge numbers of lead ingots around and between them to keep them separate, to prevent any tiny risk of accidental contact between them leading to critical mass being achieved as the first of the concrete was poured over them. Every single technician who volunteered to help with dismantling the weapon was dead of radiation sickness within days or weeks at most. It would seem likely that anybody attempting to dig up the buried fissile material after 50 years at the bottom of that shaft could expect, if they managed not to fatally irradiate themselves, to still release significant amounts of radiation into the atmosphere. The telemetry did not reveal any abnormal atmospheric radioactivity, which would suggest that nobody had successfully dug anything up yet.

Another problem would be cooling a fission reactor; although there were a couple of tiny fresh water springs on the island, more than enough to provide potable water for the crew of the old coaling station, the drinking and sanitary needs of the large British garrison that had been based on the island in the 1950's could only be met by importing fresh water by sea. Without more plentiful fresh water on the island, Lo-Pin's additional small desalination plant notwithstanding, being certain you had enough fresh water available to cool a fission reactor in an emergency would be high risk to say the least. Sea water was so corrosive to a delicate reactor cooling system that if you needed to use that to cool your reactor down, it would be nothing more than very expensive radioactive scrap afterwards.

Finally, Lo Pin had neither imported nor hijacked any fission reactor components either. In Wade's mind, that left only one intriguing, disturbing but vanishingly unlikely possibility; more investigation was required to confirm or eliminate it.

For now, though, Wade had but one priority. Turning on his swivel chair, he slid open a drawer marked 'Spare Kimmunicator' and pulled out an identikit clone of the one that was now missing presumed fried at the bottom of the South China Sea. This was the first time that he had ever needed to deploy the spare he always kept ready! He pulled out the little plastic tab that was keeping the fully charge power cell insulated from its contacts, and the Kimmunicator slowly came to life, running start-up diagnostics as it tested its systems thoroughly. While it was doing all that, Wade was reaching into another drawer of spares and pulling out a spare laser lipstick and slotting it into the secret compartment of the Kimmunicator. Once he was satisfied that it was good to go, Wade turned his attention to the problem of getting the Kimmunicator to Hong Kong so that he could have a second attempt at delivering it to Kim. He tried to connect to Dr Director at Global Justice HQ, but she was still apparently completely off the grid, as she had been all day. Wade decided he couldn't wait for her to put in an appearance, and in the circumstances Wade was pretty sure she would have been very happy to help him do what he was about to do. Although possibly not in the way he was going to have to do it...

Wade hacked the International Parcels Priority Customer database and inserted himself as a gold tier customer, then arranged for a collection van to swing by the house urgently to pick up a Kimmunicator-sized consignment, and ship it priority overnight to Hong Kong. Then he charged the transaction to the Global Justice account...


	31. The Vagor Legacy

On the night of the 11th of December 1970, the wind howled eerily around the forbidding gothic turrets of Castle Vagor, nestled high in the Inner Eastern Carpathian mountains; as it did most nights, in all honesty. The ancient and imposing castle stood in stark relief against the dramatic skyline, whenever a flickering sheet of lightning rent the storm-cloud darkened night sky. Thunder crashed and rolled around the mountains but also around the unyielding turrets and courtyards of the castle, echoing around the ancient gothic stonework ; soon it appeared, the castle walls would be scoured by driving rain as the storm broke. Soon, but not quite yet.

The darkness of the exterior of the castle was mitigated only by a handful of guttering yellow pinpricks, ancient cast iron coach lamp standards , glass blackened by the filth of the coal gas that burnt within them; all the way down the Dirijor valley as far as the eye could see and even a little beyond, the relatively soft yellow flickering glow of gas-light both from the streets and houses was as ubiquitous as it was exclusive, the sole nocturnal light source available to 200,000 households. The town gas network in the Dirijor valley was a technological tour de force, a beacon landmark in the development of European public utility networks, along with underground sewers and a pressurised water distribution system… back in 1877 when they were being built, at least. By 1970, the coal gas grid was a unique historical curio even in Caucescu's isolated and insular Romania.

Indeed, it was only once you were within the forbidding walls of Castle Vagor, away from the prying eyes of the peasantry, that electricity (other than that currently flashing around the sky) could be found at all, if you excluded the Dirijor dam itself; the giant pre-world-war-2 hydro-electric dam sat far downstream of Castle Vagor, just as the Dirijor river reached the foothills of the Carpathians on its way to joining with and flowing into the much larger Mureș river. Indeed, although lines of pylons snaked away from the dam across the rugged landscape towards Bucharest and the industrial heartlands of Rumania , there was only a single buried cable running from the dam, all the way up the valley to Castle Vagor; it delivered the only domestic electricity anywhere within a hundred and fifty miles, bypassing as it did all the habitation around and downstream of the castle. Coincidentally, Castle Vagor also had the only telephone, teleprinter or radio link with the outside world (or at least with the State Council in Bucharest) within a similar radius.

But inside the castle, storm clouds were also swirling. First-Secretary Vagor, as he was officially required to style himself since 1948, was stomping angrily around the antechamber outside the room in the North-East turret where his third wife was taking far too long giving birth to the long hoped for Vagor heir for his liking. His private secretary and his bodyguard kept their eyes averted and tried not to attract his attention, or more particularly his potentially fatal ire. Neither of his first two young wives had been successful in producing a male heir for him, and both had in due course suffered the consequences, buried along with their unwanted female issue in the private walled cemetery of Castle Vagor alongside 17 generations of the Count's Vagor, with both mothers and babies officially recorded as having died in childbirth; who could dare to contradict this, when there was nobody to tell apart from the alleged murderer himself, whose retribution against anyone speaking out would be swift, brutal and permanent?

Still, he had no wish to repeat the whole unfortunate rigmarole. He'd hate to have to order another grave dug, and go through the tedious process of selecting another young woman of childbearing age from his fiefdom to bear his progeny; this time he would have his heir, he was sure of it!

At one point he was sure he had heard a new-born baby cry, but it coincided with a particularly loud moan from the gusting wind, and the door behind which his wife had been in labour for a good many hours already remained firmly barred, so he convinced himself that it was all in his imagination; his eyes bored a hole in the heavy oak planks of the barred portal nonetheless. He knew that within the semi-circular room behind the door were just his wife of 11 months, a matronly lady from somewhere in the valley who was as close to a midwife as could be found to attend her, and a single member of what would once have been publically known as 'Countess Vagor's Personal Guard Corps' , pre-communism; _ Vagor Contesa Personal al Corpului Gardienilor_ were traditionally a small cadre of guards who had committed disciplinary infractions that attracted draconian punishment and been given a choice between spending at best a short but unimaginably unpleasant remainder of their life in the castle's dank dystopian dungeons or gelding in the style of an Egyptian eunuch, in order to better serve, protect and control the Countess without the Count having to worry about any irregular sexual shenanigans between the Countess and her jailer-protectors - and First Secretary Vagor was nothing if not a stickler for tradition…

Eventually, during a lull in the howling storm, he was absolutely certain that this time he had heard a woman's scream mingle shortly afterwards with a baby crying healthily. Within minutes, the bolt was drawn back with a dull thud, and the door creaked open; "Congratulations, Comrade First Secretary, you have a fine healthy son!", said the matronly woman, handing him a white-swaddled bundle containing a baby fresh from a mother's womb, its face still streaked with amniotic fluid.

Cradling the baby in the crook of his arm, Count Vagor quickly unwrapped the shawl , and then peeled back the cloth diaper, anxious to verify that he did indeed now have a male heir. His exclamation of satisfaction startled the baby, who began to cry, but Vagor wasn't paying any attention, flipping the shawl and diaper back over his son, and thrusting him back into the arms of the matronly woman, before striding excitedly in to the delivery room to congratulate his wife and tell her that she would be rewarded for her fecundity.

Which is where it all went wrong.

As he strode into the room, he heard the muffled sound of a second baby crying, and saw a frisson of fear pass across his exhausted looking wife's face, as she realised he had heard it. She couldn't help herself as she involuntarily glanced at the blanket box at the foot of her bed, and within seconds First Secretary Vagor was flinging the lid open to reveal an improvised crib made of blankets, with a naked baby laying in it. A baby girl!

"Please!", cried the Countess, desperately, "I have given you your heir. You do not have reason to harm his sister! I beg you!".

First-Secretary Vagor reached into the blanket box and carefully picked up the baby, cradling it tenderly in one arm while closing the lid of the blanket box. He smiled at his wife. "That, my dear, is where you are wrong. She will be a distraction to you as she grows up, stealing valuable time you should be spending on raising my son and heir. And then one day in the distant future she may be a pawn in an attempt to usurp my son, somebody will use her bloodline and the fact that she was firstborn against him. And that is a possibility I simply cannot countenance. But finally, and most significantly at this moment, you have tried to deceive me, and that can never be rewarded! Guard, open that window, right now!"

"NOO! Myyyy BABY!", screamed the young woman in horrified anguish, as the member of her personal guard who well understood that an angry Count Vagor could be bad for the health of anybody nearby, quickly flung the oak-framed window' open wide to the elements and then stood aside.

The Countess's scream of visceral anguish was matched only by Vagor's roar of "How dare you DEFY ME!", as he flipped the baby into the air, grabbed it by the legs at arms length, and spun through 180 degrees, like an Olympic hammer thrower in his delivery stroke . Miraculously, the baby's head missed the furniture and the walls as he spun her, and then when he released his hold, the naked newborn baby sailed cleanly through the open window without contact with the frame or the masonry, vanishing into the darkness. Just at that moment , there was a brilliant flash of lighting, a crash of almost instantaneous thunder and the heavens opened, rain coming down in sheets.

"Close the window!", commanded the self-appointed First-Secretary of the Committee of the Communist Party of the Dirigor Valley Judet (and chairman of the Dirigor Valley People's Council to boot), as rain blew into the room in a torrent. The guard struggled to comply, but eventually wrestled the catches into place, sealing the elements outwith again. The roar of the rain and howl of the wind subsided as the window closed, so that the distraught sobbing of the Countess could be heard above the sounds of the storm.

"I shall be merciful with you, because you are the mother of my only son and I do not wish him to hate me as he grows older. Raise him well, or consider justice for your crimes today merely deferred!".

Then he turned to the matronly woman who had carefully and efficiently re-wrapped the baby in her arms and now stood in the doorway of the room. "Hand me my son!", he said to her, and carefully took the tiny baby boy from her, before handing him to his still sobbing wife. Then, to the guard, he said "Take her to the Jailer, tell him she's not leaving! Ever!", and then to the shocked, gasping woman herself "You colluded with my wife to nurture a potential usurper to my son's rightful inheritance and you attempted to deceive me in the process. You should have ample time to contemplate your mistakes before death's sweet embrace claims you!". And then as the still protesting woman was manhandled away by the guard, Count Vagor's attention shifted.

"Right, Dinner! Alert my taster, I'm starving!". And with that he strode from the room towards the banquetting hall, his private secretary and bodyguard ghosting behind him having successfully avoided catching his attention or his ire during the preceding fraught few minutes.

oOo

Elizabeth Director self consciously smoothed the pleats of her grey uniform skirt, picked a suddenly noticed piece of white fluff from the sleeve of her grey blazer and slipped it into her pocket, touched the knot of her school prefect's tie as if to check it were still there, and then knocked only slightly timidly on the heavy oaken door before her.

"Come!", commanded a reedily imperious voice from somewhere beyond.

Betty grasped the whole-hand sized brass knob and twisted to open the latch, swinging the creaking door open just far enough to slip inside and then closing it behind her with a heavy clunk.

To one side, in an alcove between oak bookcases stuffed with impressive looking, and impressively well thumbed, leather bound volumes stood a large ornate grandfather clock which ticked and tocked to itself expressively, the sound echoing through an effective sounding board consisting of the varnished oak floorboards beneath it. To the other side of the room, above large cast iron radiators, three huge sash windows filled much of the wall. On the floor between the two bounding walls was a very large rug, atop which sat a giant antique oak desk covered in all the every day detritus of the administration of an exclusive private boarding school for girls. Behind the desk sat a tall, willowy, grey haired lady, who looked every inch the headmistress she was. Betty's mercifully infrequent visits to this room over the last many years had mostly involved minor infractions of school rules, and similar matters of disciplinary rectitude, and whilst she was now legally an adult (if only of three weeks standing), and was today standing here of her own volition rather than having been remanded for sanction by an irate Housemistress, she still felt like the 11 year old girl that had first stood in almost the same spot seven long years earlier.

"Ah! Miss Director!" said a now slightly warmer sounding Miriam Beattie, peering over a pair of pince-nez at her. "To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure? I trust your exam preparation is still going well? ".

"I'm sorry, Mrs Beatty… I'm.. I'm going to have to miss out on sitting these exams, I'm afraid….", stammered Betty.

The expression of bristling yet stunned shock on the face across the table from her spurred her on, quickly.

"I'm really very sorry. This is a classified advert from this morning's New York Times…", she said, passing the torn out piece of newsprint she had been clutching in her left hand ever since it had first caught her eye while she had been 'keeping abreast of current affairs' after breakfast. "It jumped out at me because it is Românește… err… sorry, in Romanian. There's an identical advertisement in the Washington Post, as well. To Elisabeta Dirijor. That's me, my name. Well, the name I had, anyway.. But my name, and my mothers name, are in a classified advertisement in the New York Times! It seems that my poor mother is gravely ill. I am to come back at once to be with her. I have never had to book an air ticket before, so any help you can give me with the arrange..."

Mrs Beattie clearly wasn't listening, she was staring at the advertisement , and she seemed to crumple in her chair as she did so, leading Betty to tail off into silence. She was slightly taken aback by the head teacher's emotional response; the woman clearly didn't know her mother at all, had never even spoken to her let alone met her. This reaction was… as confusing as it was disconcerting. Perhaps it was the idea of her blowing off her first chance to sit the final exams for her International Baccalaureate at such short notice that was so upsetting to the normally icily stoical headmistress?

"My poor child ", said Mrs Beattie, clearly fighting back tears as she slumped back in her chair. "My poor, poor child…", she added, looking Betty in the eye with an expression that seemed to betray anguished sympathy if not maybe even abject pity.

"Mrs Beattie?", asked Betty querulously, getting more confused and uncomfortable by the second. It was certainly terrible news that her mother, mamă, was ill; she could only conclude from the fact that somebody had taken out US newspaper adverts to try to get in touch with her that it must be very serious. But then again, she hadn't seen her mother since she was seven years old when she had left Romania and come to the USA to stay with people who were apparently friends of the family. Although in reality she had been in boarding schools since almost the day she arrived. Since that day she left home for the last time, on the back of an ox-cart as she only hazily remembered, she hadn't once spoken to her mother or father. She had sent a few postcards and pictures over the years via their friends in the US, and had had maybe one card or letter back every year or 18 months from her parents. The letters were always warm and emotional and powerfully infused with love, but they were still as rare as hens teeth and further apart than her birthdays, and always talked in generalities and non-specifics. She kept them all in an old biscuit tin, and re-read them to herself whenever she was feeling down, or as an annual birthday treat to herself. Apparently, as her parent's friends in the US had explained, it was very difficult for them to be in touch with her, and her them, and there were still no telephones in the remote part of Romania where they still lived so a phone call was equally never possible. Elizabeth certainly loved her mother, but it was love once removed, the love she remembered as a 7 year old, in what felt like a whole other life. The compulsion to see her before she died, and that was what she inferred from the advertisement - that her mother was either dying or might be dying, was truly overwhelming, but perhaps she would better understand what she felt about her mother now when she met her face to face again. So far, she wasn't feeling any raw emotion at all, beyond the compulsion to drop her life around her feet and rush off to a strange alien land of which she remembered almost nothing but which, very nebulously, she might call home.

"You must sit down, my child. Please… ", said Mrs Beattie, having come round the desk as Betty had been lost in her thoughts and pulled a chair away from the wall, placing it behind a bewildered Elizabeth, then motioning her to sit down. "There is something I'm afraid I must give you…", said Mrs Beattie. "And I'm afraid it is going to be a terrible shock to you…".

The late middle aged woman walked over to a large painting of the school's founder hanging behind her desk, and swung it away from the wall like a cupboard door to reveal a safe door with a combination lock, speaking all the while as she did so; "They said it might happen like this. I thought they were just being melodramatic. Or it was all a charade for immigration purposes. And after all these years without the slightest problem, as well. I was going to show you all this after your exams, when I was sure it wouldn't be a distraction..."

"Mrs Beattie, about booking my flight…", Betty said desperately in an attempt to get the discussion back on track.

"I'm sorry, Elizabeth, I really am, but the one thing I think I have understood is that what you absolutely cannot do is fly home to Romania. And if what I've been told is true it is extremely unlikely that your mother is ill at all. From what little I understand, she may be in... a different kind of difficulty entirely".

The safe door swung open, and there was some rustling before Mrs Beattie turned around with a large but nevertheless bulging Manilla envelope closed with string. Undoing the string closure, Mrs Beattie slipped out a dog-eared Manila folder and a fat white envelope sporting a wax seal.

"The people looking after your interests here in the USA are part of an organisation calling themselves the Romanian Opposition in Exile. They have support from our State Department. According to the most recent update they sent me on the situation in Romania, the very best thing you could expect if you flew into Romania now would be that you would be locked up in Jilava Prison, summarily sentenced to fifteen years hard labour by the securitate as either a suspected spy or a potential agitator the moment you landed in Bucharest, under what they call 'Law 209'; exiles don't return to Ceausescu's Romania so you would instantly fall under suspicion, and suspicion is as good as proven guilt. And… well, they have a track record of torturing political prisoners", said Mrs Beattie, almost apologetically. "The exiles send me an update once a year when they pay your school fees, and I add their notes to the file. I've always done them the courtesy of reading them, but of course as time went on and nothing ever happened, I paid the whole subject less and less heed.".

This came as a great surprise to Betty. In recent years she had at her teacher's behest kept abreast of current events, and she was of course always disposed to read what little was printed about Romania in the finest US publications; these yielded slim pickings indeed given most newspaper's usual obsessions, even more so at the moment with everything else having to be crammed in between their current fascination with the seemingly futile congressional investigation into the Iran-Contra scandal and the Giants going to the Superbowl. However, as far as she could tell, Romania was quite in favour with the US government because its' foreign policy seemed less slavishly aligned with that of the other members of the Warsaw Pact. She had just naturally assumed that her country was one of the more enlightened and free in the eastern bloc, and not at all prone to arrest, imprisonment and torture of even potential dissidents. Because, she just naturally assumed, the land of the free would never favour a country with an execrable human rights record purely out of diplomatic self interest. The naiveté of youth...

"But according to this file, the very worst thing that could happen would be that for some reason they do believe you, they don't put you in prison, and that they let you go back to your parent's home village in Transylvania. I don't know any more than that your life would apparently be in danger. I'm told this letter from your mother, written before you left Romania, explains things!", she said, holding up the quite tatty and dirty looking sealed white envelope.

"But… but…", stammered a completely up-ended Elizabeth.

"This letter, and this folder, were passed on to me by the headmistress of your prep school when you came up. It was passed on to her by the Romanian Opposition in Exile who helped your parents smuggle you out of Romania and over to the United States all those years ago. Over the decade it has been given a few updates, some from that Romanian exile group, and a couple of others from your parents via intermediaries. There were instructions here from day one, saying that you should be given the letter if you were considered mature enough to cope with it in the event that an attempt was ever made to get you to go back there, and in any event when you were an adult. As I said, I was going to give you all this in a few weeks anyway. I never expected… ", babbled an almost hysterical sounding Mrs Beattie. "The instructions said it might be done this way, even though they are over ten years old now. I really never… oh dear…".

" There is a lot in here for you to read. Please don't hesitate to sit right here at my desk for as long as you need. All of this is yours now. You can continue to keep it in my safe if you like, but … umm… and I'll have Emily bring in some tea for you. It goes without saying that you are excused classes today. I really, really am most dreadfully sorry, Elizabeth…"

oOo

It was a hell of a way to make a bit of extra money, the fisherman lamented to himself. It was bloody dangerous as well, as he stood precariously in a small open boat in the middle of the river, while lightning flickered and fizzed all around and about him and wind turned the river angrily choppy. His improvised anchor was holding against the fast flowing river, and he stood, poised like a fool, giant gill net in hand and ready to throw, hoping and waiting for that precise moment when the clouds would let go of their payload and the rain would started to fall. He knew that at that precise moment, the fish would interpret the sudden disturbance to the surface of the river as a swarm of juicy insects landing, and the fish would rise en-masse. Within a few seconds, they would realise their mistake as the rain continued to fall and they would sink back into the murky depths until after the rain stopped, but at that precise moment, his father had shown him, if you could cover a large enough area of the river with a big gill net you could pull out more fish in a few moments than you could catch in a week any other way he knew how. Once you'd pulled the bulging net over the gunwhale of the boat, the battle was to get the little river anchor up and row the boat to the bank before the rain swamped it and sank it.

In truth, he didn't need the extra money, or the extra fish, that much. But it took his mind and body away from the stress, the grief, the despair at home for a few hours, and that made it well worth the soaking and the danger, fish notwithstanding.

For tonight he had picked a spot in the lee of Castle Vagor, which meant he was in less danger of being blown out of his boat and into the river, but there was the downside with this spot that he had no wish to advertise his presence to the castle guard lest they took exception to it , so he couldn't light the storm lantern he normally used when he was night fishing to help him see what he was doing, and there was a thick reed bed along the bank below the castle wall which he therefore had to try to miss when he cast his net by memory alone.

And then he felt the quality of the air change about him, and sensed rather than saw or heard the deluge on its way from the clouds above as they suddenly gave up their load; experience told him that now was the moment, he lunged, launching the net wildly out across the river, hoping that he had timed it perfectly so that the first splosh of rain on the river surface would coincide with and mask the splash of his net hitting water.

His timing was indeed perfect, but as a giant fork of lightning at that very moment missed him by less than 50 metres to strike the water close to the bank on the opposite side of the river from the castle, he had an eye-searingly illuminated snapshot view of the scene around him; his timing was perfect, but his aim was awry, and a good quarter of his net was going to land on the lush reed bed around the river bank at the foot of the castle wall. There was also something else he saw. Something in silhouette. A doll, perhaps, or a particularly ugly wild animal. Falling. But now his ears were ringing after the loud bang of the lightning strike, his night vision was destroyed, and his nostrils were filled with the pervasive stench of ozone. And his net was caught. He went to yank it back in, and it was caught up in the reed beds. Or so he assumed, anyway - he could see absolutely nothing now beyond blackness with a fading after-image of a lightning bolt through it.. There would be no bountiful fish catch tonight. Indeed, if he didn't get out of the river at some point soon, there would be no boat either, and he might consider himself lucky not to end up dead, caught in the debris screens of the dam turbine sluices thirty miles downstream!

Quickly, he hauled up the little anchor; it came up without a fight but he would have been perfectly prepared to cut it loose if necessary, and then began hauling himself in towards the reed bed, carefully furling the net as it came aboard, as he tried to balance haste with care. But the other end of the net wasn't shifting, so the boat gradually got closer to the point where the net must 'obviously' be caught. In due course, the boat had six inches of water sloshing around his feet, and rising, when it came to a definite stop as the bow was jammed firmly into the tall reeds.

He could have sworn that he heard a baby cry. The wind was playing tricks on his mind.

There was nothing for it; he'd have to risk leaning over the prow and trying to free the net without toppling into the water. If that didn't work, he might have to abandon the valuable net and make a run for home on the racing current, downstream. Even if he did think he could wade into the reeds to retrieve the net, he'd never get back in the boat…

Carefully, wedging himself up into the bow, he leant forward, keeping tension on the net, feeling for where it was hung up… and then suddenly, something warm grabbed his finger. And hung on. And this time, not only did he definitely hear crying, but his other hand found… a small, wriggling, newborn baby, wrapped in netting...


	32. Speechless

Kim studied the neat touch-screen control panel that was set into the wall of 'Holographic Dojo 645' with no little anticipation. She had already been surprised, as she walked into the cavern, to see a robot vacuum cleaner, and a robotic floor washer-polisher suddenly stop work, bleep apologetically and scurry away to Kim knew not where through a small hatch in one wall of the cavern, but the holo-dojo control panel itself was really intriguing. Initially it had been blank, apart from a large icon in the centre of the screen with a caption that seemed to change with each flash, cycling through different languages but presumably saying the same thing in each; "Touch Here to Begin!" it said, when the English version of the caption briefly appeared, so she had done just that. Instantly the screen had changed to say 'Good Morning Kim Possible', in English. Presumably it had read her fingerprints or scanned her DNA or something in order to identify her, and of course Lo Pin had a record of her language preferences already so there was no magic involved. Still, Kim felt uncomfortable enough at the amount of data Lo Pin now held about her to make a mental note to ask Wade to retrieve and erase her records on his systems, after this tournament was over, just to be on the safe side!

After she had touched the panel again to tell the cavern's systems that she was ready to proceed, the wall panel had asked her to stand still with her arms akimbo while it scanned her and calibrated itself, and Kim had watched a trio of high resolution cameras on gimbals in the ceiling rocking back and forth in sync as they 'mapped' her. Now it was asking her about her preferred opponent. She quickly selected 'All Out Combat' on the touchscreen, pushing the slider all the way along a scale that started at 'Gentle Sparring'. Then she selected 'Any & All Styles' from a picklist that in theory allowed her to chose a 'cultural root' for her virtual opponent's fighting skills, and even an individual style. To begin with, she selected 'Weapons: None', just to get going. And then she could select a number of opponents, from one to ten; Kim wasn't being conceited when she selected ten simultaneous opponents, merely realistic, since it simply wasn't conceivable to her that any single opponent, let alone a hologram, might be a match for her...

'Touch here to begin!' flashed a large red lozenge shaped icon on the display. So she did.

Immediately, a great web of what looked like a hundred or more lasers mounted all around the cavern sprung into action, with a concerto of whirring stepper motors, and ten 3 dimensional granite-grey but slightly luminescent humanoid shapes with only very vaguely sculpted facial features were apparently painted into existence around the holo-dojo in random locations and poses, where they stood in impassive statuesque immobility. Looking again at the touch screen, it now bore a message "Bow to begin!".

'Wow! That's incredible!' thought Kim involuntarily, as she began to walk around the cavern, marvelling at the very convincingly solid looking virtual statues. It was only when she reached out to touch one of them that her hand went straight through the illusory grey humanoid, the touch screen on the wall behind her changing with a bleep to a warning lozenge saying 'Cannot begin while you occupy the same space as an opponent!'. When she pulled her hand out of the grey humanoid's torso, there was another rather friendlier beep as the "Bow to begin!" message re-appeared on the screen.

Kim decided that it was time to see whether this was all gimmickry or whether you really could train this way...

She was already nicely limber after her warm-up run up the stairs carved into the cliff face, but she did a few final stretches anyway as she positioned herself optimally in the crowded cavern, and not knowing what to expect, bowed formally towards the nearest grey statue.

Instantly, ten statues sprang to life, twin glowing points of blue light appearing where eyes would be on a human being, and formally returned her bow, before starting to move around as if they really were a gaggle of well trained assailants aiming to do her harm. Meanwhile, for her part, Kim found herself instinctively moving to close angles and reduce the number of opponents who were simultaneously able to attack her, just as she would in a real fight against ten goons. When the first grey hologram with the glowing blue eyes leapt at her with a very well executed flail kick, it looked and felt real enough, as Kim dodged, sending the grey holographic foot barely half an inch past her left ear - perhaps only the lack of breeze from its passage would have revealed that it was not a real foot - and countered with a simple yet powerful Shotokan Karate Mawashi Geri (roundhouse kick) to the midriff, which made firm contact with thin air, but looked like it hit its target square on. Her reward was the grey hologram turning red and then vanishing entirely.

And then there were nine.

If you are a student of chaos theory you will know that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon rain forest can be blamed for all manner of consequential events in the world. Nevertheless, you would have been hard pressed to guess that upon Kim's next seemingly innocuous arbitrary decision would later rest the survival or extinction of almost the entire human race...

Kim decided that Shotokan Karate was working for her, despite the fact that she rarely used many pure Karate techniques when she was fighting. The option on the touch screen to handicap the holographic opponents to just one style or group of styles had given her an idea; if she stuck to just one style for an entire fight, especially a style that she rarely used, it might give the holograms a little much needed help, while enabling her to practice skills she never or rarely used in actual combat.

Two of the grey holograms appeared to chose that moment to launch a co-ordinated attack, and Kim was forced to backflip away, clonking one of them under the chin with a viciously whipping Mae Geri (front kick) as she went. Except there was no clonk, although the hologram did turn red and then evaporate.

The fight continued, and Kim was totally immersed in the experience, it felt very real, apart from the lack of actual fist or foot on flesh impact, and the holograms weren't half bad opponents. They were certainly better than 95% of hench-people she found herself engaged with, but of course they weren't good enough. Ten of them at once was certainly giving her a work-out though. Make that eight now. Or six, as she jumped between two assailants to administer a Sokumen Morote Tobi Geri, or a jumping double sidekick to their left temple and bridge of the nose respectively in old money, sending them red and then vapourising them. Then four, as she dropped under a co-ordinated three way attack to viciously leg-sweep two of the holograms so as to smash them into the ground head and face first. And funnily enough, she wasn't missing the delicious jolt of the impact of a well delivered strike half as much as she would have imagined she would.

Soon, there was one left, and Kim's curiosity about the technology temporarily overcame her natural compulsion to win. She faced off against the last holographic opponent, but rather than dodging his… it's... attacks, she tried blocking them. Proper, well executed blocks stopped the incoming blows in their tracks, but even as her body was involuntarily bracing for the brutal impact of fast moving kick onto braced inside block, there was nothing; no sickening jolt, no pain, and no bruises later either. She wondered whether she even needed to strike with power, given that she was hitting fresh air rather than a real opponent, so she tried a rapid but deliberately ineffectual waft of the hand at the grey humanoid hologram. Her hand went right through the hologram, as you'd expect, but instead of flashing red, it flickered yellow, and a sad sounding electronic 'bongle' made it very clear that if you didn't strike the holograms with proper power, then you didn't strike them at all.

Finally, she threw an arm sloppily into the way of a whipping spinning heel kick; it took every reserve of nerve and self control she had not to dodge the strike, nor to block it properly; had she thrown her arm so sloppily into the path of such a powerful kick in reality, it would undoubtedly have shattered both her radius & ulna, and probably irreparably ruined her elbow joint. Instead, Kim had to watch a foot moving at great speed right towards her head and not react as her instincts screamed, knowing that her head in reality wouldn't come flying off her shoulders under a great impact.

In fact what happened was that the holographic kick went straight through her deliberately ineffectual block as if it wasn't there, and then the statue froze at the moment when it's heel connected with her head, as a sound that sounded remarkably like a jingle serenading failure played in the cavern.

The last hologram, now glowing green and not grey, remained frozen in the air at the moment of impact for a good few seconds, as Kim waited for the next 'game' or 'round' or 'session'. to begin, or for something else to happen. Eventually, she realised that nothing much was going to happen unless she prompted it, so she sauntered back to the touchscreen control panel again, to find that it was showing a lozenge that said 'Touch for replay!'. So she did. And instantly, the green frozen hologram evaporated, to be replaced by ten luminescent grey holograms, painted into the exact same positions they had been in at the start of the round. Ten luminescent grey holograms, plus one additional humanoid figure… a blue one, which was, lack of features notwithstanding, clearly a holographic representation of herself! The three dimensional action replay started at the point where she had bowed, and she was able to watch herself in action from any and every angle, walking through the fight and around it, raising her left hand to rewind a little, her right hand to slow the action down, as per the instructions on the touch screen.

Kim found working with the replay utterly fascinating.

She well understood, to her great chagrin, that her greatest challenge as an instructor was relating to, mentoring and teaching skills to people who simply couldn't do what she could do. She had long struggled to transfer some of her skills to others without leaving them feeling confused, disheartened, alienated, patronised or frustrated. She had very early on learnt that when somebody who wanted her help with their technique asked how an 11 year old girl could punch with the speed & power of a steam hammer the way that she did, they looked at her with blank incomprehension when she explained the order in which she engaged the individual muscle groups in her arm to give the punch optimal power, and yet didn't respond well to being told that they wouldn't ever really understand, either. It was the main motivation behind her taking up cheer leading. It wasn't the physical challenge, not least because cheer leading really wasn't any kind of physical challenge for her - it was the far more terrifying prospect of trying to develop and communicate ideas for successful routines and moves that ordinary gymnastically talented and athletic teenagers could understand, learn and perform, without ending up on her own in a squad of one!

It remained a work in progress, although she felt she had come a very long way over her Middleton Mad Dogz Cheer Team career. So far she had even managed to keep Bonnie Rockwaller on the team and contributing mostly positively, despite her early clumsy mis-steps that had soured their future relationship probably irreparably. This was an achievement she sometimes considered more impressive than occasionally saving the world, despite the many angry tooth marks in her tongue.

But she had never before had the opportunity to coach somebody who did have her gift, for the obvious reason that as far as she knew, she was uniquely gifted. Which made being presented with a millimetre perfect holographic action replay of a fight she had just participated in incredible exciting for her, as Kim quickly busied herself being hyper-self-critical of her tactical positioning decisions and strike selection, with the benefit of hindsight. Although she did have to admit to herself, after rigorous slow-motion analysis, that her execution of the Shotokan techniques she had selected was utterly flawless. So flawless, indeed, that she decided to switch from solely using Shotokan Karate techniques, to exclusively using Mantis Kung Fu techniques for the next 'fight'...

Eventually she had seen and learned enough. The replay ended at the moment when the last remaining hologram had kicked her in the head with her acquiescence, and she raised both hands at that point to end replay playback and to start the next battle.

At that moment, a computer generated 'Bingle Bongle' resonated around the cavern, and a holographic tableau appeared in the centre of the cavern, with a somewhat cartoonish hologram of a figure who was obviously Lo Pin standing between one of the grey figures and the holographic blue figure. The Lo Pin hologram held up and then flourished a fan in suitably dramatic fashion, awarding the win to the grey figure, which promptly jumped for joy like an over-excited pedigree pekinese, while the blue hologram representing Kim looked dejected and trudged away, head down. Clearly it was meant to be a humorous interlude, a little homage to those chop-socky arcade games that Ron had spent so much time playing when he was a kid, while Kim watched over his shoulder. But by the time the little tableau had faded, and a glowing '1-0' had appeared in the air in mid cavern by way of a scoreboard, Kim's eyes were blazing as she irrationally regretted letting the computer win. "That's your one… there won't be another!", thought Kim, knowing how ridiculous her need to win purely for the sake of winning was, even as she was unable to help herself.

Walking back to the touch panel, she opened the options up again, and flipped the 'Weapons?' option from 'None' to 'Any'. Then she saved her change, and tapped the screen. Immediately, the stepper-motors whirred once more and ten grey figures were painted seemingly randomly into the space of the cavern, but this time each of them held a red holographic weapon of some description. There were swords, staves and knives of all types in the hologram's hands, all rendered in the same eye-catchingly contrasting colour, Kim noted as she cracked her knuckles with grim determination and strode out into the middle of the crowded cavern.

"Game on!", she said, half to the faceless grey holograms, and half to herself, as she positioned herself amongst her computer generated opponents. Closing her eyes, she took a moment to centre herself. Then, opening her eyes, she took a final look round, and bowed…

oOo

"OK, I'm definitely getting a headache now...", said Dr Director. "Let's just go back over what we think we know. We are all agreed that she would have wanted to get off that island as soon as possible, if not before, in case anybody came looking for her, yes?".

The two tired and unkempt looking scientists both nodded in the affirmative.

"So if we assume she escaped at the earliest opportunity, where could she have gone?"

"Well that's our problem, isn't it...", lamented "Digger" Hawke. " According to the Lloyds Register, there were three commercial vessels that departed Ilha de Santo Antão for off island destinations in the 36 hours after we know she was hobbling around on the beach there, but one of them was boarded and checked by the CIA because it sailed through the area where the plane went down, and the other two haven't yet made landfall, which would make them a poor choice of transport for an injured fugitive worried about staying off the grid and one jump ahead of any pursuit. Not only that, Shego's going to be the world's worst anonymous stowaway. Both ships are still in normal communications with their owners and other vessels, and neither has used any duress codewords, so it's really not very credible that she's aboard either ship. In fact, I can't see any way she could expect to get away by sea without a trace! In short, her best option would have been to have flown, if she could, to somewhere she could lose herself. Somewhere in Africa, or Europe. Even here in the Americas. The problem there is, there is an airfield on Ilha de Santo Antão with a theoretically useable runway, but it has been shut down and abandoned for a few years now, dangerous cross-winds in the approaches apparently, so there was no exit there for her! Her next best escape option would have been finding and provisioning a fishing boat or some other small vessel that she could take to West Africa without anybody reporting it missing, however unlikely that may seem. And then she'd have needed to navigate 400 miles of treacherous ocean, some of which was at the time the most intensively surveilled area of ocean in on the planet, without being spotted by the CIA. Frankly, if I was her, I wouldn't have liked the odds of that working out well for her. I wouldn't have liked the odds of staying put without being discovered much either, but unless she found an escape route we haven't yet, that was her best option. But if she is still on the island she's hiding herself very well, and I don't know what she's eating or drinking... "

"Well I suppose it's possible that she's holed up in a cave in those mountains in the interior, eating whatever small reptiles she can catch, but if she is we'd better find out, in case she reverts to type and does make an escape attempt! But I assume we all agree that the smart money says she isn't on the island, for the obvious reason that she's too much of a survivor to beat impossible odds, swim ashore, then crawl into a hole and wait for starvation and thirst to finish her off, so I have to assume that she has gone somewhere else, we just don't know how or where yet!", mused Dr Director, her brow furrowed. Then she glanced at Mike, who was giving more attention to his Global Justice laptop than he was to the discussion. "You've been very quiet, Mr Jones. What's on your mind?".

Without looking up from the screen, or unfurrowing his brow, Mike Jones rather distantly replied "Tracks. The tracks…".

"What about the tracks, Mr Jones?", Dr Director asked sharply, pulling him back into the discussion.

"Oh...sorry. I'm looking at the tracks Mr Load found for us. Shego's tracks. You remember she headed North West along the beach, until she turned inland onto solid ground, and we gave up any hope we had of tracking her by satellite…"

"You've spotted something?", prompted Dr Director, her one good eye lasering him intently.

"I… think… so. So, from where she came ashore, to where she left the beach, is about two and a half miles. She hobbled along the sand and shingle, across some fairly nasty rocks in some places, wading through the sea in others, bare feet and improvised crutch and all. But she didn't have to. She could have made her way up to the cliff top via an obvious path about half a mile along the beach, and had a much easier time of it on the cliff top. In fact there were half a dozen places where she could have left the beach, but she chose not to. And the more I've learnt about Shego, the more I understand that she does things for a reason. She might be mistaken, she might make poor decisions, but she didn't hobble all the way along a rocky foreshore for no reason, and she didn't head inland where she did for no reason either!"

"OK, that makes sense. I assume you have you drawn some more specific conclusions?"

"I think she stayed on the foreshore because she didn't want to risk being seen by anybody. We worked out earlier from the tracks that she left those tracks on a tide receding from high water, so just after midnight, but it would only have taken one person to get even a glimpse of a naked green woman hobbling around and everybody would have heard about it within a few hours, and the game would have been up. So she stayed on the foreshore where even the small chance of that happening was minimised. Which means that something must have tempted her to leave the beach when and where she did…"

"Maybe daylight? Maybe she needed to lay up before sunrise?", hazarded Professor Hawke.

"Yes, that would have been the obvious explanation, but it doesn't fly. See those footmarks there?", he asked, pointing at the screen of his laptop which was filled with Shego's footprints, some of them partially washed away by the sea; "That was the tideline when she passed that point, and that puts her 50 metres from where she left the beach at a little after 3am. So it wasn't daylight. And it wasn't the first human habitation she had passed either - she slipped past a couple of isolated houses and a small hamlet to get that far. But just at the point where she left the beach, you could see this restaurant from the beach…"

"Restaurant?", asked Dr Director.

"Yeah… it could be just a café bar, actually. Anyway, something about that place, something she could see from the water's edge, drew Shego off the beach. And then she vanished into thin air. But maybe working out what she saw could help us work out where she went...", said Mike.

"A vehicle?", hazarded 'Digger' again.

"I don't think so….", said Mike Jones. " There were several accessible vehicles visible from the foreshore that she could have boosted between where she came ashore and this restaurant. But if she wanted to stay dead, then she wouldn't have wanted to steal anything within a thousand miles of where that plane came down. Maybe she saw a truck she thought she could stow away on, but at 3am, that's hardly likely. And anyway, see, the car park is the other side of the building from where she was looking from before she changed direction, so…",

Professor Hawke suddenly jumped up and half yelled "The Dumpsters!" .

Mike Jones & Betty Director both looked at him expectantly.

"Sorry…", he said apologetically, "It may be nothing, but.. can we see the same spot from the satellite photo 24 hours earlier?".

There was a brief tapping of keys, and Mike Jones pulled up the other satellite photo, and then arranged the two images side by side.

"Bingo!", said a breathless Dr Hawke.

"Enlighten us, please…", prompted Dr Director…

Mike Jones stole 'Digger's' thunder. "They're the other way round!", he observed. The one with the black lid is on the left in the first picture, and on the right in the second… "

"I'm none the wiser!", said Dr Director testily.

"These dumpsters in the little paved alleyway at the eastern end of the building… they are visible from the foreshore. I worked for a few months driving a municipal garbage truck in Melbourne to pay the rent while I was completing my Doctorate, and anybody who knows anything about dumpsters knows that these ones are designed for mechanical handling. It means that Ilha de Santo Antão has garbage collection for commercial waste. They have those trucks that have a big hydraulic lift at the front. Well, I assume they do, otherwise they've bought a bunch of very expensive specialised dumpsters, and shipped them out to an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, just for laughs! Anyway, the only reason somebody would wheel those big heavy dumpsters out of that alleyway and then wheel them back in the other way round would be if they had been emptied in the meantime. So they were emptied some time between the two pictures. And if Shego had seen that they had been wheeled out of the alleyway ready to be emptied by a dump truck, and if she had climbed inside one of them before it was emptied, then she'd have gotten a free truck ride under a pile of stinking waste to wherever trash is dumped on this island!", explained Professor Hawke.

"OK, that's an interesting theory. But can you prove it happened? And how does it help us work out where Shego went if you can?", asked Dr Director.

"Let's find out what happens to the island's garbage, and then maybe we I can answer both questions…", replied the Antipodean, sheepishly.

Dr Director sighed, in the way that only somebody resigned to being forced into doing something they really don't want to do can sigh, and hit the isolation switch to reconnect her office to the grid once more. "Oh well, I suppose I needed to speak to Mr Load again today anyway. Perhaps after he has patched me through to Kim Possible, he can tell me all about the waste disposal arrangements on Ilha de Santo Antão…."

oOo

Monkey-Fist glared angrily at the immobile green hologram, one of six remaining of the ten he had been fighting. When the mystical monkey power surged through him, ten holographic opponents were but a mere bagatelle, to be swatted contemptuously aside. The problem, frustratingly for Lord Fiske, was that the power that made him feel all but invincible when it flowed, had a nasty habit of ebbing at times. Times not unrelated to moments when he failed to resist the temptation to gloat at his own perceived invincibility, mainly. Although he didn't understand it himself, while he'd spent significantly longer basting in the magical field created by the four idols than the blonde kid had managed, it was still nowhere near long enough to ensure that his inner mystical monkey was 100% reliable; nothing seemed to send his monkey spirit scurrying away to hide behind the metaphorical mental furniture like hubris did. Which was unfortunate for poor old Monty, given that hubris was one of his defining traits.

It certainly helped that, through years of intense and diligent training and study, he was already a master of Tai Sheng Pek Kwar before he obtained the mystical monkey power. Two, three or at a push four of the translucent grey foes would stand no chance against a man of his undoubted skill and training. Sadly, six was one or two too many. The moment he had paused, after taking out the first four holographic foes with a single stunningly quick, expertly timed and placed 'Wooden Monkey Frenzied Feet of Fury' , to sneer smugly at the remaining sextet of assailants, he was entirely on his own as the monkey magic fled from the grasping fingers of his psyche. He held the horde at bay for best part of a minute, desperately defensive, frantically blocking and dodging their attacks while equally desperately trying to reconnect with his inner supernatural simian, but eventually he had had nowhere to go as three of the slightly translucent avatars with glowing blue eyes triple-teamed him. One foe went high with a spinning back-fist that he was forced to block, one simultaneously went low with a vicious leg sweep that he was able to jump over and the third, the one that MonkeyFist couldn't dodge or block, came up from underneath a split second after he had left the ground avoiding the sweep, with a powerful sidekick into his midriff; it was this last hologram that was now glowing a victorious green, frozen in time and space with an outstretched leg apparently impaling his stomach.

He was already in a less than stellar mood, after his admittedly somewhat tenuous hope of obtaining the Lotus blade once again, and defeating his nemesis once and for all, appeared to have been dashed; when his sources in Japan had told him that Stoppable was training at Yamanouchi, and that the School would be sending somebody to represent them at the tournament, it had never even occurred to him that it was remotely possible that they could conceive of sending such an unworthy young fool to represent them, mystical monkey power or no mystical monkey power. But when he was further informed before he headed for the reception centre himself that Stoppable had caught a flight to Hong Kong, he had almost convinced himself that Stoppable, and therefore probably the Lotus blade, would be at the tournament representing the school! It was quite a disappointment, upon sneaking a look at breakfast time, to discover that some great oaf he didn't recognise was representing Yamanouchi, although that did beg the question 'Where is Stoppable?'. Probably lost in Hong Kong. He had already seen that accursed Possible girl here, perhaps he had flown to Hong Kong merely to wave her off? However, he had noticed that they were rarely far apart for long, and if he was somewhere on the island, then if he was a little patient, he would soon have the forces at his disposal to locate the blond usurper, kill him and claim the Lotus Blade for himself! And Mystical Monkey Power would once again be only his!

Angrily, he dismissed the replay before it had even begun, scowled his way impatiently through the little 'Winner' tableau, then stalked over to the touch screen to tell it to start another round. He had already stomped back to the middle of the cavern, and adopted a Tall Monkey Waits For Angry Chimpanzees stance, before a smidgin of good sense overcame him, and he paused, sat down cross legged to meditate and attempted to clear his clouded mind.

Ten minutes later, he opened his eyes, which sparkled momentarily with the faintest hint of blue, and then sprang back into the Tall Monkey Waits For Angry Chimpanzees stance, before bowing formally. Moments later, with a screech that sounded almost other-worldly, he unleashed Mystical Monkey Power once more upon the holographic phalanx that was ranged against him. This time, he didn't pause to gloat or sneer mid-fight, partly because the memory of his recent ignominious defeat was too fresh, but mainly because there wasn't time, as within a dozen seconds the last holographic opponent was turning red and then, instead of blinking out like the other nine, exploding into thousands of little red cubes that flew to all corners of the cavern, as an electronic fanfare serenaded his victory.

Unfortunately for his overall score, though, the little holographic tableau that followed MonkeyFist dismissing the chance to watch a replay of the round, the one where a holographic Lo Pin awarded his triumphant avatar the victory over the dejected grey opponent, proved too much for any faint vestige of humility that might have been restraining him, and as he cackled smugly once again at his own peerless skill, his inner magical simian sloped off into the spiritual undergrowth, probably out of sheer embarrassment as much as anything else.

The next round... wasn't going to turn out quite so well for him.

oOo

Shego finished the last sequence of her modified Wing Chun dummy form in absolute agony, pain as horrendous as any she had ever endured, made worse because this time it was deliberate, clinical and self inflicted, without the benefit of the flood of adrenaline that accompanied real jeopardy; instead she was forced to endure, tears stinging her eyes, teeth clenched, head swimming occasionally, stomach occasionally threatening to revolt. Her pain threshold was high, but even so, excruciating did not remotely cover it, and all without the benefit of any pain relief; not only did her effective immunity to most pharmaceuticals prevent her getting buzzed on biblical quantities of booze, but she couldn't even take anything to 'take the edge off' before doing something agonising like re-breaking and re-setting a bone that had broken and then healed imperfectly, or indeed something like mashing a badly scarred muscle to hamburger so that it could re-heal from scratch in a carefully controlled therapeutic environment, without the scar tissue.

Twenty five times she had run through the entire dummy form, and during each run through she had sickeningly slammed the most severely injured and already painful parts of her recently terribly abused body into the unyielding stainless steel training form numerous times, with as much force as she could muster. The result was that the soft tissue of her left thigh, and of her right bicep, were now mulshed to an agonising pulp, the flesh an angrily throbbing black and purple mess rather than the pale green it would normally be, the muscle all but obliterated. However, that was the point of the exercise; she had effectively pulped all the soft tissue of one thigh and one upper arm, but more importantly from the perspective of her recovery, she had pulped the troublesome scar tissue that was previously a source of continual pain, restricted mobility and risk of a catastrophic muscle re-tear!

Stiffly, painfully, she hobbled to the centre of the terrace, her left leg threatening to collapse at every limping step, her right arm hanging almost like a limp noodle. And then, after a deep breath, she began the rehabilitation process. A slow, graceful, Tai Chi form. Her eyes still glistened behind the White Ninja's mask, and her teeth were still gritted against almost unbearable pain, but as she began the smooth, gentle, continuously sinuous movement of the first form, if you could have seen behind the mask, you would have seen the beginnings of the ghost of a smile forming.

oOo

Ron awoke with a start after his impromptu post-breakfast nap. He was laying spread-eagled atop the large, comfortable bed, wearing only a pair of the incredible shrinking black 'pyjama trousers', and despite blazing sun outside, signified by the eye-searingly bright patches on the wall, the trickling cooling water running through the suite seemed to be doing its work well; he was warm but not sweltering. Having said that, if he had been in the bed rather than on top of it, he suspected he might have been rather less comfortable. He was suddenly conscious that he might well be being watched, an uncomfortable feeling whenever he allowed himself to think about it. Uncomfortable, and for what he had planned later on, quite... problematic! It was a problem he hadn't yet come up with any solution for, either.

He stretched lazily, yawned expressively, and then flipped out of bed athletically from prone, landing nimbly alongside the bed on the balls of his feet in a tall monkey stance, but he instantly slouched, self consciously scratching his nuts in an 'I've just woken up and had an urge to scratch my nuts, then I realised that I was on teevee and that scratching my nuts would look gross and uncouth to the security guy watching, but then I further realised I wanted to maintain my cover and that I needed to pretend that I definitely didn't know I was on teevee and so I decided to make myself scratch my nuts anyway in an entirely nat-ur-al stylee' kind of way.

He hoped fervently that his faux-naturalistic nut-scratching was convincing, as he sauntered towards the door of the bug & camera-free bathroom. When he opened the door, he was assailed by a hot, humid wall that hit him in the face like a warm, wet flannel. He quickly stepped beyond the portal and closed it behind him.

It was only the acutely tuned ears of a true Monkey Master that could detect, amongst the other sounds of the bathroom of suite 137 (and beyond it the many sounds of Lo Pin's island and its temporary inhabitants), the sound of a Naked Mole Rat snoring contentedly, concealed in his little nest up on the shelf. Indeed it was only when Ron drained his lizard with much watery splashing in the bowl, and then flushed, that Rufus awoke, and peered out over the side of his nest with a mixture of caution and indignation. He had been sleeping off a truly epic breakfast, before his slumber had been disturbed, courtesy of the Ron Stoppable doggie bag delivery express, and hadn't really appreciated the interruption, although he was pleased to see that it was Ron rather than anybody else using the facilities.

"Hi, little buddy!", said Ron, cheerily, as he washed his hands at the sink under Rufus' high perch. "Are you OK with being left on your own here while I go and show my face for a bit? I don't think I can spend the entire day in bed, or hiding out in the bathroom, more's the pity!", he lamented.

"No problem!", chittered Rufus happily, "I can!". The little pink rodent grinned from ear to ear, to indicate that he was entirely happy to finish sleeping off breakfast. A momentary frown crossed his little pink features; "Bring me lunch?", he enquired hopefully.

Ron grinned. "Of course! But I'm glad one of us can spend the entire day sleeping, I think I'm going to have to take you with me tonight…", said Ron, his tone slightly more downbeat.

"Why?", asked Rufus, apparently a little incredulous.

"Because I'm going to be 'in the bathroom' for an awfully long time tonight, and not on camera in bed, and if they send some of those security guards to investigate, especially if things kick off wherever I am, then I don't want them finding you. These are not very nice people, Rufus little buddy, and I shudder to think what might happen to you if they found you and realised that I wasn't here. I think I'm going to have to run a serious risk of discovery tonight to find out what I need to know, and I'm probably going to have to improvise a lot if I do get discovered. But I'm a lot more confident about protecting you if you are with me than if I leave you here!" he explained, unhappily. " I just hope I don't trip over whatever Kim is working on in the process. Or put her in any danger!", he added even more unhappily.

"Danger?", asked Rufus, surprised.

"Yes. If I go out on the prowl tonight in this body, then I'm definitely busted, because they'll know exactly who is sneaking around, one look at me will tell them that, I'm the only person this size & shape on the island. And I won't be in bed, which will be something of a double giveaway. If I go out 'as myself', then if they realise that Saru Chonoryouko has gone missing from his room, that will suggest that there is some connection between the spy creeping around the island and the representative of the Yamanouchi school, and with Lo Pin's sources, that would very quickly point him straight to me . And that in turn would point him straight to Kim. Perhaps I should try to find a way to warn her?", worried Ron out loud.

"Oh…", chittered a suddenly deeply concerned Rufus, whose brow immediately furrowed in deep thought.

Rufus wasn't concerned for Ron's personal safety . Not after what he had seen of Ron training at Yamanouchi, but especially not after what had happened in Hong Kong. Rather he was concerned for his sanity. The episode at the slum in the quarry had been deeply, deeply shocking for Rufus. It wasn't that he was squeamish, in similar circumstances he was sure he would have done the same thing given the opportunity, irrespective of mystical monkey power; a naked mole rat defending its life, its burrow or its queen would go to the most brutal lengths to prevail, without a moment's hesitation, but Ron wasn't a naked mole rat, and humans, or at least some humans, or at least his best friend Ron, certainly couldn't walk away unscathed from utter carnage feeling like it was a job well done under any circumstances, nor as Rufus had observed at first hand, could Ron dodge crippling feelings of guilt just because there hadn't been any alternative less brutal path to his own survival. Ron had been recruited to this task by Yamanouchi as an undercover spy, not as a one man army; the Ron Stoppable Rufus knew and loved like a colony mate would never have signed up for a mission if he had known that it would entail him unleashing the kind of violence that made the Terminator look like the Easter bunny. If he was discovered tonight or tomorrow, Rufus was terribly afraid that the result would be another charnel house, with Ron standing atop another growing pile of dismembered corpses. If he found himself in Ron's place, Rufus knew he could treat that potential outcome with equanimity, but he wasn't in Ron's place. Could Ron cope with that? Could Ron cope with Kim's reaction to seeing Ron do that? It would be awful enough all round when Ron had to explain what had happened in Hong Kong to Kim, without her seeing a similar gore-fest first hand as it happened. And if the mayhem actually consumed Kim somehow, if she was killed or maimed in the unstoppable meat-grinder of mystical monkey-power unleashed, Ron would surely take his own life, so unbearable would the mental anguish be for him. Or perhaps, turn to the dark side, and unleash a terrible revenge on Yamanouchi; Zorpox had to be in there somewhere, and Zorpox with full-force mystical monkey power might just be the literal end of the world!

Actually, Rufus had no idea what would happen if Ron's spying mission turned into another blood-soaked clusterfuck, but he was pretty sure that it would be nothing good. Because it could be nothing good. The terrifying thing was, after Hong Kong, he wasn't sure that he could imagine exactly how bad it might get!

"You need to be two places at same time!", chittered Rufus, thoughtfully. "But if you leave this here…", he said, indicating the tiny backpack device that he had earlier used to sweep the suite for bugs, but which could also be used to auto-hack the digital security cameras to rebroadcast a particular image rather than what was actually in front of their CCD detectors at any given moment, "...then you'll defintely be spotted!".

Rufus was right, although he was stating the blindingly obvious; the little device could be used to fool the spy cameras in the suite by rebroadcasting a loop of Ron in bed for as long as he was absent, although if the moon went behind a cloud in real life but not in the looped footage, an alert camera operator might spot the discrepancy and notice that something was up. However, Lo Pin's island was much more comprehensively covered in security cameras and sensors than either of them had hoped it would be, with the result that even getting to the lower levels without using the device would be almost impossible without appearing on camera, or tripping a laser grid, or an Infra-Red detector, or a motion sensor, and once he was spotted, of course all hell would break loose. In the public areas it might be possible to map the cameras and detectors during the day, so at least one knew what one was trying to avoid, but the moment Ron went into the dark underbelly of Lo Pin's island, it was quite likely that the first he'd know about his being detected without the protection of the device would be when a couple of dozen crossbow-toting Dragon-Fist guards came for him.

How to square this circle?

"You need decoy…", Rufus chittered, thinking about what it would take to make a lifelike full-size mannequin that could be left in bed to fool the cameras. How would they get the raw materials into the bathroom here where they could work? That would be impossible, he realised. Could he turn the toilet paper and hand towels around him into a convincing enough life-size papier mache model of Toshimiru?

No, he realised, deflated. He might just be able to run to a model of Ron, with the torso and limbs bulked out under the covers using all of his spare clothes and all of the bathroom linen, although he doubted it would fool anybody who looked at it critically even on a CCTV screen; Toshimiru was just far too damned big. If only somebody else could wear the cuff… of…. Sosumiha…

"Decoy! Decoy!", chittered Rufus excitedly!

"Huh?" said Ron, confused.

Rufus pointed to himself and said "Decoy!" again, then pointed at Ron's wrist, before miming donning a heavy belt, then expanding like a balloon.

Ron suddenly understood what Rufus was suggesting. "Woah, Rufus, no way little buddy, we've no idea what would happen if you tried the cuff on. No idea at all. You could end up some hideous half man half naked mole rat with all your insides on the outside or something. It could kill you!"

Rufus frowned. "My life, my choice!", he chittered with some irritation. "Alternative? Lotus blade always seem hungry for more blood….".

Ron was brought up short by the last comment. "Low blow, Rufus. I'd hate for anything bad to happen to you."

"I'd hate for anything bad to happen to you. To me. To Kim. To everybody else on island. Worth a try!", Rufus shot back quickly.

Rufus had him, he knew. It was the answer. With a living, breathing Toshimiru in his suite, in his bed, then even if Ron was spotted as he skulked in the shadows of the bowels of Lo Pin's island, he only had to make his escape from the immediate contact and there was nothing to link him to Saru Chonoryouko, Yamanouchi, Kim or anyone else. He could effectively vanish into thin air leaving nobody any the wiser as to his identity, without having to kill anybody. Against that, the risk that donning the cuff would turn Rufus into a giant mole-rat burger was quite a small one. At least, he hoped it was; his knowledge of multiple-millenia old magic was limited to say the least. He sighed, a sigh heavy with resignation. Then, with a pop and an inrush of air, he was Ron again, as the heavy cuff fell from his wrist into his cupped hand, the incredible stretch pyjama pants plummeting under gravity to mid-butt level before the elastic fabric found flesh again with a slightly painful sounding slap.

Rufus smirked. Then smirked again when a slightly pouting Ron offered him the cuff, pointing instead towards the middle of the bathroom floor. "Oh... yes…", said Ron, who had clearly not thought through the implications of 290lb of chiselled muscle materialising on the small shelf above the sink; he helped Rufus down to the floor, and then handed him the cuff, before backing up against the door to the bedroom to give Rufus the room to 'grow into'.

The little pink rodent looked around warily, shuffling himself equidistant from the bathroom fittings to give himself maximum clearance from some kind of plumbing related injury, and then he hefted the heavy cuff up around his midriff in his two tiny pink paws, looked at Ron and chittered "Here goes nothing!". Then he slammed the cuff closed.

Ron's inner monkey, still boosted by the cuff, felt the giant explosion of magical energy that occurred in the middle of the bathroom floor, while Ron himself felt the massive change in air pressure that accompanied it, as a three inch rodent instantaneously expanded to fill a volume several orders of magnitude larger. The pop left his ears ringing, and rattled the door in its frame, but there standing in front of him, grinning from ear to ear and chortling in amazement as he carefully studied his enormous hands both front and back then ran them slowly over his massive torso, was a butt naked Toshimiru, in the flesh!

"Well what do you know, little buddy? It worked! It actually worked!", said an excited Ron, careful to keep his voice down nonetheless such was his paranoia that the bugs in the bedroom might pick something up through the door or wall.

Rufus grinned happily and mouthed something that could have been "Wow!". Except that absolutely no sound came out. Rufus looked confused, and mouthed something that might have been "Hello?". Then he frowned and looked like he was trying to shout something. Then he successfully chortled, hummed, whistled tunelessly at the second attempt, and finally, after mouthing something else that Ron couldn't decipher, he looked Ron in the eye and mouthed something that he definitely could decipher.

"Awww… Fuck!"

oOo

The shaman, Xi Xe, sighed, as the brooding warrior stomped away. People had no appreciation of the amount of effort that went into the enchantments behind a magical project this complex. Toshimiru was clearly increasingly impatient, and recently had started muttering more loudly and pointedly about estimates and delivery dates and blown deadlines, but he was here, and he was doing his best, wasn't he?

Not that he had had much choice.

His life had taken a very odd turn about a decade and a half ago. He had learnt everything he had known about magick at his supposed father's side. Mostly that there was no such thing, save what you could convince the gullible of to help you separate them from their goods and gold. Well, 'Shaman Shu' always said he was his father, but he had many reasons to be sceptical as he got older. Many reasons, but never enough reason. As a result, he criss-crossed Northern China from village to village until he was about 15 or 16 years old , and for as long as he could remember he had walked ahead of the cart, leading the horses, while 'Shaman Shu' rode aboard the cart. When they stopped, it was his job to make camp, start a fire & cook food, while 'Shaman Shu' did 'important spellcasting' in the back of the cart. By the time he was a teenager he had just started to figure out that he was as much a mark as all the people 'Shaman Shu' conned on his travels, but much stupider because he had fallen for it for hundreds of times longer. Nevertheless, he was still there, because until he figured it all out, what the hell else was he going to do?

And then karma caught up with 'Shaman Shu', when a squad of soldiers protecting a tax collector arrived in a village that he never been back to discover the name of from one direction as he and Xi Xe arrived from the other. This alone wouldn't have been any problem, had the county magistrate not been escorting the tax collector, and the wife of the district chief of police not been a previous 'beneficiary' of Shaman Shu's magical flim-flam some years before. Suddenly Xi Xe was running for his very life, chased across the countryside by foot-soldiers and angry peasant farmers , having seen Shaman Shu surrounded and being beaten by soldiers and peasants alike, prior surely to an inevitable trip to the executioners block.

That should and almost certainly would have marked his retirement from any and every involvement in anything to do with 'magic'. It might well have marked the enforced end of his involvement in being alive, given the fact that his pursuers weren't about to give up, and that the soldiers tasked to bring him back to face justice were armed with crossbows with which they only had to be lucky once to end the chase. However, fate lent a hand as he ran over a crest and promptly fell off the edge of the world, legs flailing in space. Before he had had time to realise what had just happened, he had found himself tumbling down an extremely steep, rough, scree slope, like a boulder gathering pace, soon being chased by rocks and stones as they were dislodged by his passage until there was a full scale landslide all around him. Then, just as he thought the end was nigh, he had fallen though a hole into blackness.

Some time later he had awoken, head throbbing, to find himself laying on a stone floor in a dark hole, illuminated only by a shaft of sunlight coming from a jagged patch of blue sky above him. And sitting cross legged, opposite him, was… a monkey. Not that he exactly knew what a monkey was at the time. In any case, this monkey had glowing golden eyes that matched the golden armour he was wearing, he also carried a staff over his shoulder ringed by golden bands. He was also more generally luminescing, and grinning cheerfully at him.

When Xen Xi moved, the glowing monkey spoke, in a very impressive, very powerful, very commanding tone of voice; "Ah, Xen Xi, what brings you to my altar?".

"Wh… who are you?", asked Xen Xi timidly.

The monkey put on a great show of looking visibly shocked; "You don't know? You are the first person to set foot in this temple since it was buried by an earthquake almost 700 years ago, you pay your respects at my altar by landing on it head first from a great height, and you don't even know who I am? Perhaps I should call those soldiers who were chasing you and ask them if they know who I am…".

"I know you are a trickster clothed in an animal pelt, and more than that I need never know. Run tell your tales, I say it's a matter of luck which of us ends up on the executioners block, if not both of us. Now leave me be, I have a headache that you are making worse…", Xen Xi had contemptuously responded.

The monkey man had laughed, seemingly delighted. "I should really have introduced myself, shouldn't I. How rude of me. My name is Sun Wukong, but you may also know me as the Handsome Monkey King, or the Great Sage Equal of Heaven, or perhaps most relevantly, given that you have just now desecrated my altar by cracking the stone with your head and then bleeding all over it, the Buddha of Victorious Battles. Before I left the earthly realm behind I was already invulnerable and immortal, so I'd not be hugely afraid of an executioner blunting his axe on my neck, even were I still flesh and blood. And I've defeated all the armies of heaven in battle single handed, so I think half a dozen of Lord Hung Tai's militia might have a little trouble arresting me. And anyway, you… are a fine one to be calling anybody a trickster, Xen Xi. Why, the very rags on your back were bought with the sweat of the honestly gullible, be they desperate or merely greedy. What say you to that?"

"My father is a trickster, not I!", Xen Xi had said heatedly, admitting explicitly to himself as well as the monkey man what he had known for a few years by unspoken implication for the first time.

"He's no more your father than I am. He bartered you as a small child in exchange for some herbs that he said would cure your father's cancer and a scroll that would save your mother and sisters from starvation. Of course, your father died of his cancer and your mother and your siblings did all starve to death. When she gave you up to 'Shaman Shu', your mother was desperate enough to try anything, even though in her heart she knew he was a fraud, but she was right when she calculated that with him you had a chance to live, with her you would surely die!", the monkey man with the golden glowing eyes had replied, the golden eyes twinkling.

"That's not true, trickster!", Xen Xi had exclaimed, angrily.

"Is it not?", had asked an amused monkey man. "Let me bestow upon you the gift of second sight and divination, that you might better be able to answer that question and understand the world you live in! In fact, since you insist that you are no trickster, and that Shaman Shu is your father, from whom you are about, in two days time after his sudden but not unexpected death , to inherit the family trade, the only thing I can do is give you the magic your 'father' has long claimed to possess so that you can ply your trade honestly! "

There had been a blinding flash of white light, and then Xen Xi had found himself waking up again on the stone floor of the dark hole, head throbbing to an evil beat, this time looking at moonlight above him. Confusingly, though, there had been rubble and debris on top of him that suggested that he had been laying there immobile since he landed, when he had felt sure that he had in fact sat up earlier to chat to the monkey man. He immediately assumed it had all been a vivid hallucination. He had been desperately hungry and thirsty, though, so he had wasted no time in rolling over to stand up… and promptly discovered that rather than laying on a stone floor, he was actually laying atop a raised altar. Meaning the glowing monkey man he had obviously imagined had been sitting three feet off the ground.

Fortunately he had landed on his feet rather than his head.

Immediately he had realised something shocking; the moon was illuminating the side of the altar he had just rolled off the edge of, into which was carved a great deal of adulatory text about the Buddha of Victorious Battles, and Xen Xi could read it; hitherto he had been entirely illiterate, never having been to school nor even having seen much of the written word. He realised now in a flash that the 'magical scrolls' that 'Shaman Shu' had sold to the ignorant and gullible had contained nothing more than random squiggles and pen strokes, presumably because Shaman Shu had also been entirely illiterate. And yet somehow, he, Xen Xi, could now read, and write, numerous languages.

He had emerged from the hole in the ground he had fallen through to discover that three days had passed while he lay unconscious on Sun Wukong's altar in the abandoned temple ruin. As he had experimented with strange techniques and ideas that had almost immediately popped into his oft throbbing head, like scrying and divination, he had discovered that 'Shaman Shu' had met an abbreviated end before Xen Xi had even woken up, and he had also realised very quickly that his entire understanding of the world & what was real or not real lay in pieces . Soon his experiments in scrying had told him that what Sun Wukong had said about his family, and how he came to be dogsbody to a bunko artist, had been entirely true. They had also told him that he needed to put distance between himself and the regional authorities hereabouts that regarded him as a criminal if he wasn't to suffer the same fate. Thus it was that he had headed southwards, initially aiming for somewhere that he was sure 'Shaman Shu' had never preyed upon during the Xen Xi's time as his dogsbody.

The next few years revealed a frustrating truth to him; it was far easier for a charlatan with a polished line of flim-flam, a wagon load of props and no shame to sell fake 'magick' to the gullible and desperate than it was for an itinerant tramp to sell real magic to anybody. He therefore eeked out an existence for the next few years, selling divinations to those wishing to have decisions they had already taken validated, curing the occasional pestilence, ending the odd drought and stopping the odd flood. Mostly he lived hand to mouth, but he discovered another problem; when people did start to believe the evidence of their own eyes, word always spread, and before long somebody felt threatened. Whether it was the local Taoist abbott, the local civil authorities or the local gangster kingpin, any fleeting measure of success was always followed by another knife-edge escape from some terrible fate or other, in just the clothes he stood up in. Thus it was that he had found himself, a decade and a half or so after 'Shaman Wu' lost his head, plying his own small scale mystical trade in Manchuria, casting a few spells to pay for food and lodging, never giving the right name, always moving on from village to village in a couple of days.

And then the headaches had started. Not that they had ever really gone away entirely after he had cracked his head on that stone altar, but now they had got fierce. Really fierce; like somebody had put a giant vice round his head and squeezed so hard he thought his head might explode.

After three days of this agony, during which he hadn't slept and had started wishing for the sweet release of death, the pain suddenly receded and he was soon sleeping like a baby on a hammock slung between two trees in a secluded grove. Whereupon he received a nocturnal visitation from an old acquaintance he hadn't seen for 15 years; The Monkey King, golden armour and all. This time, Xen Xi recognised him and knew all about him. Indeed, several times he had cursed the golden eyed simian, on those rare occasions when he decided that the conversation he had had in the ruined temple was real rather than a hallucination, for giving him some of his extensive knowledge of magic without giving him any of his martial prowess to stand alongside it, something that bothered him most when he was running for his life from people trying to do him harm, as happened all too often. Sun Wukong chided him with a smile for his alternating lack of faith and lack of gratitude. And then he asked Xen Xi about the headaches. Of course Xen Xi asked the annoying simian what he knew about it, and with a twinkle, Sun Wukong replied that he knew how to make them stop. Left unspoken was the implication that he had started them in the first place.

It had turned out, at least the way Sun Wukong explained it, that the headaches would stop for good, if Xen Xi merely enchanted 4 stone idols to contain some aspects of Sun Wu Kong's essence and implant them into those who came near them, since the Monkey King had become bored with the affairs of heaven and looked for a way of influencing affairs on earth to make them more amusing for him now that he was no longer able to participate directly himself, what with the whole 'ascended to Buddhahood' thing. When Xen Xi angrily protested that enchanting 4 idols with so much complex magick would take months, during which time he would surely starve or be driven away from the site of his work, Sun Wukong had smirked, pulled a handful of whiskers from his luxuriant sideburns, blown on them theatrically and thrown them into the ether. The next thing Xen Xi knew he was being shaken awake in his hammock, two days after he had gone to sleep in it, by a nondescript young man who responded to the obvious question by informing Xen Xi that he had been sent to help the shaman with his onerous task.

Within a couple of days, there were 36 of them. More interestingly, when Xen Xi examined their auras and divined their origin, all of them had existed on earth for no more than a couple of days, and none of them had what you could describe as a human essence; they were constructs, magical avatars, each a single aspect of Sun Wukong's own essence. They weren't, strictly, alive at all, even though they were apparently living and breathing human beings. Xen Xi knew of the legend, knew that Sun Wukong could according to the ancient tales make an army of magical avatars to do his bidding from the hairs that grew on his body. Were these they?

In no time at all, Xen Xi put them to work. Most of the avatars seemed to be skilled martial artists, although they seemed to his inexpert eye to have a range of different fighting styles, and many of those he tasked to defend him as he worked on the most ambitious and complex spells and magicks he had ever constructed. Four of them seemed like inveterate drunkards, never without gallons of rice wine that they had acquired from Xen Xi knew not where, but yet they had seemed the fiercest fighters of them all, judging by the lumps they spent all day knocking out of each other. Four of them had told him that they were best placed to forage for him, and indeed when he tasked them to bring him various magical components he required for his spell casting or just to find provisions to feed and water the small army he had overnight acquired, they came through in spades. Typically, three of them would forage diligently and locally, each protected by a bodyguard, while the fourth stunned Xen Xi by summoning a cloud down from the sky and flying off aboard it to gather the rarest components he needed from places far beyond the horizon, and there were four who were apparently highly skilled troubadours, who earned money for the project working the local villages as entertainers, playing music, and the fool. When the need for expensive components grew greater, he sent some of his fighters to work as mercenaries for local warlords and they returned with armfuls of gold and coins with which almost anything that was purchasable could be obtained, from both near and far. Of course in due course his antics had come to the attention of people who decided he was a threat to them and needed to be dealt with, but his army of expert warriors had kept the barbarians from the gate very effectively, and the final four members of his magical army, two men and two women, had performed services of a more... personal nature, making Xen Xi very very happy, and teaching him things about the arts of love that he would never have learnt otherwise, but also earning him more gold and coin for his project than even the most richly rewarded of his mercenaries ever managed.

For months, Xen Xi had worked diligently putting together a vast toolbox of spells and enchantments, which he could use in turn to make more complex spells and enchantments, and then with those make more complex enchantments still. His resolve to complete this great work had been stiffened, whenever he had allowed himself to think about abandoning it, by the sudden return of the crushing headache that had led him to start the project in the first place, but as he neared the eventual completion of his task, he had been forced to face up to the fact he had been aware of since he had initially sketched out the high level design for this magical tour de force, that his army of thirty six magical avatars, aspects of Sun Wukong himself, were far more than assistants, they were vital components of the final spell, and that each of the four stone idols he had to construct would contain the nine distinct magical essences, currently contained within the magical avatars. He had known it, and he had been certain that the avatars themselves knew it, but the prospect had never seemed to concern them in the slightest; they seemed to view it as their purpose and destiny.

Come the day, therefore, when he had fired up the magical sculpting table he had constructed, which had in turn begun to magically sculpt the four differently coloured jade monkey idols while he had begun casting pre-prepared spell after pre-prepared spell, thirty six magical avatars queued patiently to await the end of their physical existence, although not before they had slain a company of the local Lord's militia men that had attempted to disrupt proceedings. As the spell casting proceeded, in sequence, each avatar had evaporated into a ball of glowing blue energy, and nine of them had been absorbed into each monkey idol.

In no time at all, Xen Xi had been alone again with the smoking wreckage of his magical sculpting table and a flock of buzzards feasting on the recently slain corpses of the militia men. Then within the hour, he had been running for his life with just the clothes on his back and four monkey idols barely cool enough to carry, each wrapped protectively in the discarded clothing of Sun Wukong's 36 avatars and slung over his shoulders in sacks.

Sun Wukong had rather unfairly left it to him to decide what to do with the four idols. He had hoped that having directed him to spend months of his life making these powerful artefacts, Sun Wukong would have popped back and told him why, and who to give the power to. The one thing he would have liked to have done, which was to absorb the power they radiated himself, wasn't an option; as the spell caster who had made them, he was immune to their effect. Failing that, and knowing that whenever he had even fleetingly thought about destroying the idols, the crushing headache returned, he had been faced with a horrible dilemma. He had known he would never be safe, and always be looking over his shoulder, and he had known that for most of the people who were after him, the power of the idols would have been used first to kill him more efficiently, and then to do great evil. Since even thoughts of spreading the idols to the four winds and hiding them had brought on the blinding head pain again, he had known he needed to find somebody to pass the idols on to who wouldn't have immediately used the power they contained to eviscerate him and then establish a new brutal all-powerful dynasty to rule the world.

The dilemma had resolved itself, three months later. He had been running headlong down a ravine, being chased by a mob of cutthroats and thieves who wanted to steal the apparently valuable jade idols, when he had encountered a group of warrior pilgrims dressed in the strange garb of a foreign land. Rather than setting upon him themselves and attempting to rob him, they had unquestioningly waded into the pursuing thugs, suffering some injuries in the process of killing most and driving off the remainder. Xen Xi was by now entirely unsurprised that he could speak their strange alien tongue with perfect fluency and was thus able to thank them for selflessly saving him, and then refusing any payment or reward; when their leader, Toshimiru, had told him that they were questing for something called mystical monkey power that he had first heard about in a dream, and that they would be taking it back to Japan with them when they found it, Xen Xi had been ecstatic; he could offload the jade idols without getting a headache, to somebody who had just saved his life and probably wouldn't immediately kill him, and then the guy with the monkey idols would be heading off across the ocean never to return, so he wasted no time in introducing the pilgrims to the jade sculptures, sharing mystical monkey power with all of them. He had barely bundled up the monkey idols after exposing the pilgrims to their incredible power and witnessing the flow of the essence of nine aspects of Sun Wukong into each of them, before the robbers who had escaped from the fight earlier had came back for a return fixture, this time bringing all their friends. Xen Xi had gotten to see mystical monkey power in action up close and personal, and had immediately decided that he was quite glad it would be on the opposite side of an ocean from him. He had also felt doubly personally indebted to Toshimiru, who had saved his life yet again. And, much as he wanted to see the back of the four idols and the foreign pilgrims, he realised that without them sticking around for a while to protect him he would probably be dead very very soon, because the few surviving bandits seemed to have assumed that Toshimiru & his mystical monkey powered disciples all worked for Xen Xi, which meant that pretty soon so had everybody else, and that had made him a prime target for everybody within 100 miles who could raise a body of fighting men, all at once.

Xen Xi had decided that he could combine rewarding Toshimiru for saving his life yet again, with a cunning ruse that would keep his force of supernaturally skilled bodyguards around him for long enough to ensure that they could finished off all the people trying to kill him, which - having seen the way Toshimiru's mystical monkey warriors fought, he had been certain they would. He had offered to forge Toshimiru a magically powered indestructible shape-shifting sword of incomparable power, an offer Toshimiru had accepted readily and gratefully. Only then had Xen Xi started to try and work out how on earth he could possibly deliver on such an ambitious promise.

Days had turned slowly into weeks, as Xen Xi had researched and designed and drawn magical architecture diagrams and cast spell after spell to build up libraries of the most complex enchantments yet known to man or even magically gifted non-human being. Every day the hilltop he was working on had crackled and fizzed with powerful magic, and at least every other evening the funeral pyres had burned tall and bright as the latest crop of attackers were disposed of before the smell of rotting flesh became unbearable. The magicks he would need to forge the sword he had decided to call The Lotus Blade, after the key component of one of the most complicated spells in the library of enchantments that he would later use during its forging, were coming together nicely, although there was precious little to show for his efforts yet beyond a sulferous smell, a lot of scorch marks, a handful of scrolls and several glowing talismans that contained stored spell energy awaiting release. However, his theory that eventually the magically enhanced pilgrims would exhaust the supply of bandits, militia men, mercenaries and soldiers attacking them was proving to be complete bunkum.

By the time he had fired up the magically powered forge in which the Lotus Blade would be cast, aligning the monkey idols around it, and begun the climactic final spell casting where all the components he had so far manufactured were brought together to build the finished product, the attacks were still coming every couple of days, though now at the scale of small armies, from much further than 100 miles away, and he had realised that actually the more power Xen Xi was perceived as having, the more people would learn of him and consider him a threat; hanging with Toshimiru had made him infinitely less safe rather than more so. He had occasion to rue not acting on his original instinct which had been to get the pilgrims and the jade monkey idols the hell out of China! Instead, he had handed a still smoking, freshly cast Lotus blade to Toshimiru, thanked him profusely for his protection, wished him a safe passage back to his homeland, and then late that night, had magically disguised himself as an old woman and snuck out of the camp, aiming to get as far away from the pilgrims as possible before dawn.

He made it away from ground zero, and over the next few days as the pilgrims made their way back towards the coast, the circus (and it's attendant trail of corpses) followed them. In due course they must have found a ship, and sailed away from China, because the furore faded and things returned to something roughly approximating normality.

With one shocking difference, that became clear over the following few months,

Wanted posters started appearing with quite a good likeness of his face on, and a huge, huge reward detailed underneath it, dead or alive, posted by a General of the Imperial Army.

Pretty soon he had only been able to sleep with one eye open if at all, had barely been able to keep himself fed, and had been perpetually on the run, with every village he went into and everybody he met a potential mortal enemy who might suddenly kill him for a reward that constituted riches beyond the dreams of avarice to anybody outside the upper echelons of the urban political & military elite in China.

To be honest, it had been a blessed relief when a small group of Toshimiru's disciples had caught up with him as he skulked, paranoid and scared, in a muddy ditch somewhere in Manchuria and begged him to come to Japan with them, to solve Toshimiru's unfulfillable but unbreakable promise problem. He had done his best not to seem too eager, but it really had been his only option for survival.

And now, he was designing and magically building something that made the Lotus Blade look like a cheap party trick.

But it was late. Many months had passed, like many deadlines, and Toshimiru was impatient to leave the village to go and set up his school, but was tied there by his debt of honour and the fact that Xen Xi hadn't managed to get the magicks quite right yet.

The problem was the sheer complexity, and the need to cast a huge list of pre-prepared spells to make this magical 'Cuff of Sosumiha' bracelet work, while the metal was still semi-liquid on the magical forge, before it cooled. Too many spells, and they took too long to cast, meaning that the bracelet stopped taking magical input before the spells were complete, and was, in effect, 'just' a bracelet that might leak magical flux into your arm and cause all your teeth to fall out. To fix this problem, Xen Xi had been going over all the spells he had already written, including those spells that he had already built as part of 'The Lotus Blade' project and was re-using on the bracelet, and worked to pare them down, make them more efficient, combine multiple components into a single spell, make them quicker to cast. At the beginning this had been easy, yielding huge improvements in efficiency, but the more he worked on making the spells tighter, smarter, quicker, the less inefficiency there was still to find, and he was now in the position of making major changes to the magicks and enchantments to gain tiny reductions in spell casting times.

Another side effect of the complexity was that in order to make the time constraint, he was using a number of pre-cast spell components for each run, where he would store the energy from a very complex and long-winded spell in a magical vessel (usually a rock) until he could release it during the main spell casting effort. The issue there was that after a failed forging session, all those pre-cast component spells needed re-casting to prepare for another run; a failed casting meant a minimum three week delay to the project while he re-charged all the necessary talismans, even if no other changes were required, but of course other changes were required otherwise the spell casting wouldn't have failed in the first place!

Xen Xi knew he was close. Very close. If he was very lucky, he thought he might get away with it, the last activation spell might just hit the bracelet before it cooled too far and ended up being 'just' an ugly bracelet with unfortunate side-effects. But he didn't want to be lucky. He wanted to deliver without luck being required! Toshimiru's look of visceral disappointment after the last run had failed saw to that. He really needed to shave just a tiny bit more off the build process, and do it quickly. He wasn't going to find the ten minutes of spell casting time he thought he needed to be safe, in a nine hour solid enchantment process, from efficiency improvements in the spells he had already prepared at this late stage without spending weeks on the job, but perhaps he could take some unimportant things that were currently in the build out of it?

However, he knew he had to be careful - there was a lot of apparent fluff that he had discovered the hard way he simply couldn't leave out, otherwise the final activation spell failed, just returning a foul cloud of black smoke and a burning pictogram hovering in the air telling him which part of the spell was missing. All that stuff about the sexual function of the Toshimiru avatar, for example; it took screeds of hideously complex re-entrant self-modifying spell-casting to get all that working, and Xen Xi really couldn't see any of the mystical monkey masters he had yet met getting it on with anybody any time soon, since they seemed far to interested in the whole 'killing people in vast numbers' thing. And yet, when he tried to drop any of the spells that supported and made the avatar itself a master of all nine forms of mystical monkey power, the whole build process failed.

On the other hand there were a number of ancillary 'nice to have' spells that perhaps he could do without.

There was a complex set of spells that enabled a mystical monkey master without hearing to use the Toshimiru avatar's ears to hear, even if they had been deaf since birth and had no concept of sound whatsoever. However, complex as it was, it only took 30 seconds to add to the bracelet, because it was one of the pre-cast spells stored in a glowing talisman and added to the main spell with a single word of command.

There was a monster spell that enabled a blind monkey master to use the Toshimiru avatar's eyes, even if he or she had never seen anything in his or her life and had no concept of vision, no optic nerve, no visual cortex; this was a good twenty minutes of intense spell casting, even with the pre-cast elements, but the problem with dropping that function was that there actually was a blind monkey master amongst Toshimiru's disciples, and he could do without having to explain to an irate Monkey Master the difference between a bug and a feature...

Then he saw it; a piece of very clever enchantment to allow somebody born without vocal chords or any concept of how to use vocal chords to use the Toshimiru avatar's voicebox to speak, even if they had never spoken before.

"That's not ever going to happen!", thought Xen Xi, even as he sighed at the elegance of the beautiful enchantment he was about to rip out of his giant magical masterpiece. "And if it does, they can damned well use use sign language!".


End file.
